Deepfakes: face swapping with open tools
On 11 December 2017 Motherboard reported that a Reddit user called deepfakes was putting actresses' faces into pornographic videos with a network trained in Keras and TensorFlow. On 7 February 2018 Reddit closed r/deepfakes and banned intimate images made without consent, including those that have been faked.
Why it matters
A convincing face swap in video was made by one person with open libraries on consumer hardware, not by a studio. Within two months platforms changed their rules, and a user's name became the name of a whole class of harm.
By Motherboard's account the faces came from Google image search, stock photos and YouTube videos; the researcher Alex Champandard estimated that a consumer graphics card does it in hours and a CPU in days. By TechCrunch's, r/deepfakes had over 92,000 members before it closed, a pinned post pointed to an app called FakeApp, and Pornhub, Discord and Twitter had acted earlier. The record does not claim when deepfake became a common noun: in the article of 11 December it is only the user's name, and Reddit's announcement does not contain the word.