Fake porn has been around since time immemorial, but recent months have seen the practice take an unsettling leap forward thanks to AI-based video technology that allows people to easily map other people’s faces onto bodies that aren’t their own. Now video game characters’ faces are getting stitched onto IRL bodies as well.
Warning: the links in this post are NSFW.
The now-notorious Deepfakes subreddit, subject of write-ups from every tech publication under the sun, is for the most part a bottomless (or, I suppose, bottomful, depending on how you look at it) sea of debatably legal celebrity porn. While some folks have used the tech to put Nicolas Cage in everything, the bulk of deepfaked content involves big names like Daisy Ridley and Gal Godot in compromising positions. Some of the fakes are convincing to a worrisome degree when you consider the potential implications for things like revenge porn. Others are awkward. Others are nightmarish. Video game character face-swaps, unsurprisingly, are mostly the third thing.
At a glance, clips of Triss and Yennefer from The Witcher 3 look passable, but then you notice the discoloration of their skin, the weird smear effect that overtakes their faces when their expressions change, and the slight but off-putting uncanny valley-ness of it all. Overwatch’s Mercy, a subject of multiple deepfakes, is even worse. Her exaggerated cartoonish features don’t map well onto real human faces at all, resulting in a strange human-game flesh puppet mash-up that’s not right no matter how you look at it.
Somebody also tried to reverse the process and map actress Lauren Cohan’s face onto a Fallout 4 character, which resulted in this nightmare:
This clip ratchets one of deepfakes’ most nauseating issues—faces that briefly glitch out of existence—up to 11, alternating between a series of dead-eyed robotic facial expressions all the while. It looks like something out of a horror movie and is, without a doubt, a telling herald of the grim, viscerally upsetting future just beyond the horizon of our grim, viscerally upsetting present.
It’s all pretty strange, given that game-derived video tools like Valve’s Source Filmmaker already have thriving porn communities surrounding them. You’d figure an engine that can basically recreate video game characters in most of their proper fidelity would be the logical endpoint of video game porn, rather than the Frankenstein disaster these video game deepfakes have given us. SFM videos, however, take hours upon hours of time and effort to make, not to mention a fair amount of know-how. Deepfakes might end up proving to be easier. On top of that, imagination is a large component of porn, and I’m sure some people have always wanted to see their favorite characters in the IRL flesh. I guess they don’t particularly mind if that flesh is technically somebody else’s.
Deepfakes have also begun to worm their way into wider video game culture. I’ve come across clips purporting to depict people like Twitch streamer KittyPlays and cosplayer Jessica Nigri. It’s not entirely surprising, given that they’re both internet celebrities in their own rights, but they also present themselves as having more open, accessible personas than many traditional celebrities, making the practice of inserting their faces into porn feel even more invasive somehow.
At this point, video game deepfakes are still a small part of a niche (but rapidly growing) scene. Questions abound. What’s the legality of using real heads and bodies here? What about virtual ones attached to other people’s intellectual properties? What sort of impact will this have on things that aren’t porn, if anyone ever gets around to taking a break from making porn for more than two seconds? Only one thing is certain: it’s all really, really fucking weird.
Update - 2:20 PM, 2/7/18: The Deepfakes subreddit has been shut down for violating Reddit’s policy against “involuntary pornography.” Given how much press the subreddit got for months, it’s a bit odd that it took this long for Reddit to put its foot down.