Remember ‘Deepfake’, the artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis technique that proved once and for all that when it comes to humans, where there’s innovation, there’s masturbation.

Basically, deepfakes can be used to put anyone’s face onto anyone’s body. This resulted in a number of pretty convincing porn videos of celebrities, including Gal Gadot and Taylor Swift.

When deepfakes arrived on the scene last year, what started out as harmless fun quickly evolved into a creative way to harass people, and especially women, online.

Now, reports Mashable, one online company is looking to rehabilitate deepfakes. Plot twist – they’re doing it using porn.

One of the first uses of deepfakes was the swapping the faces of porn actors and actresses with those of celebrities, a big part of what led to deepfake bansacross the web. However, the adult film company Naughty America is looking to flip the telescope on that kind of scenario and make it 100 percent consensual.

Naughty America’s new service lets customers insert images of themselves into scenes, transport porn stars to a whole new setting by changing the background, and, in one example, blend together the facial features of two different actors.

Certainly sounds more appealing than that DIY WhatsApp porn group we wrote about yesterday. So how does it work?

“We’re customizing content using deep learning,” Naughty America CEO Andreas Hronopoulos told Mashable. It’s clear Hronopoulos is no fan of the term deepfakes.

“We’re just using deep learning to edit.”

The “deep” in “deepfakes” stands for deep learning, which is how artificial intelligence learns to mimic based on the data (images, videos, etc.) presented to it. It’s basically what’s driving this new kind of image-manipulation technology.

If you want to be porn star in your own video, you would have to pay between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars, depending on the level and detail of the customisation.

You would also have to provide the company with a ton of visual data, such as photos and video of facial expressions or reactions, or anything else that you want to be included in the video.

But what is going to stop people from using other peoples’ visual data to continue in the tradition of deepfakes, and make revenge porn?

Hronopoulos is aware of the issues that arisen around deepfakes. To deal with previous issues concerning nonconsensual use of the technology, the company has a legal team involved making sure consent is obtained from the performers involved.

But what about consent of the user, or rather, the person in the images? Naughty America hasn’t made clear how it intends to verify whether users have the right to use the images they submit. Misused, the company’s new service could be a tool to create high-quality revenge porn. However, Hronopoulos said Naughty America is aware of the concerns and is taking precautions.

Naughty America says any customers who want to use the customization service would have to submit the same documents they would if they were a performer. The identification would have to match the images of the person who wants to be inserted into a film. The end product would be provided to that specific customer directly, delivered in a format preferable to them.

So you get the admin side of a porn career as well. They’re really going for authenticity here.

I’m still not convinced that this isn’t going to morph into some kind of scandal, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, enjoy this Nicholas Cage deepfakes compilation:

[source:mashable]