Mr Deepfakes can make you a porn star

It would be naive to assume that, because you’ve never performed in a porn video, you will never appear in one. In fact, these days, anyone with access to an image of your face can, in a matter of seconds produce an extremely convincing video in which you appear as a porn star.

One man who has done this countless times, to countless women, without their consent, is one Mr Deepfakes. As the founder of the most prominent deepfake porn website in existence, he has chosen to remain anonymous. He built the burgeoning community “from scratch” as a side hustle, after deepfake porn was banned from Reddit in 2018. It is, he claims, a place where “users affected by the ban could go”, to ensure the technology wasn’t unfairly “squashed”. MDF, as he styles himself, cites a commitment to free speech, and a desire to advance machine learning, as his sole motivations.

But in Deepfake Porn: Could you be next? MDF comes across as a man struggling with “the more moral aspect” of his work. On the one hand, he ardently claims to respect women (“100%”!) and insists this principle is reconcilable with his passion project. On the other, he has no plans to tell his wife — who would “probably be against” deepfake porn, “to put it bluntly” — about his work. “I’m afraid of how it would affect her, knowing I work on something like this.” He admits that “the content is actually in a grey area, and I think we’re on a fine line”.

Despite this ethical “indecision”, MDF’s website is thriving. It has amassed more than 20,000 deepfake videos of women loosely defined as “celebrities”, who are divided into 23 categories that include “Cosplay”, “Threesome” and “Asian Celeb”. Each day, an average of 25 new videos are added by a team of deepfake porn producers. There are 13 million original visitors who view this content every month, 10,000 of whom are online at any given moment.

In these videos, the facial expressions, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies of the deepfaked subject do not belong to the victim whose face we see. They are the creation of a male fantasy. It not only looks like the victim is performing porn, when they never have, but also that they are engaging in the producer’s favourite sexual acts. Their identity is hijacked. When a victim sees herself embodied in the form of a porn performer, she describes it to me as a feeling of extreme disassociation. That is her face, but that is not her body.

Mr Deepfakes rakes in a high four-figure profit per month, mostly from ad revenue. He’s probably earning upwards of $100,000 a year from the venture. This money goes mostly to “maintaining the servers”.

Most of his effort, meanwhile, goes to imposing strict ethics on his website. Or so he claims. MDF recites his boundaries to minimise harm like a script: no porn niches that are “defamatory”; only “celebrities” allowed; the age limit is absolute; and producers must “make sure people know that these are fake videos” by ensuring “every video is watermarked”. But ultimately, MDF’s defence always comes down to separating the videos’ potential consequences from their creators. “We’re not all bad people!”

MDF claims he is simply an advocate of technological progress. He is, he says, facilitating the improvement of AI, while “other communities like Reddit wouldn’t allow it”. It just so happens that the best way to do this is through the “porn niche”: a convenient assumption that MDF treats as an awkward but inevitable fact. The “community” forum, the section of the website where content creators discuss how to improve results, is therefore what he cares about most. It fails to generate any revenue, at least for now. But this is hardly a charitable venture. This “community” is working to develop a tool that’s being used as a weapon against women.

And the ethical boundaries imposed by Mr Deepfakes fall apart on close inspection. There is no clear definition, for instance, of a “celebrity”. It includes women in the “mainstream media”, like those who appear in “Hollywood films”, but also “social media influencers”. And of course, “politicians are in the public domain”, so they can be targeted too. It is, in short, any woman with a public life. Many of these female “celebrities” already receive so much sexualised publicity in the media that MDF’s community think they are “fair game”. Or in the words of one user on the forum: “If you plaster your face everywhere and thirst trap me into seeking out your visage, then I’m just gonna deepfake you into porn.”

The majority of Mr Deepfakes community are “probably men”, he admits. Male users who are becoming radicalised by getting to “pick and choose aspects of different girls”, and digitally manipulate them into performing sexual acts.

Disturbingly, one regular poster on the site admits to deepfaking his co-workers. “Walking into work after having deepfaked these women, it did feel odd, but I just controlled my nerves. I can act like nothing is wrong, no one would suspect a thing.” The video is for his eyes only, he insists; it now exists on his hard drive, which he sees as merely an extension of his imagination. Asked if he would create a custom deepfake of an ordinary woman for someone else, he replied: “From a moral standpoint, yeah, I don’t think there’s anything that would stop me.” He went on to make a deepfake of someone after a Zoom call.

The forums on MDF’s site seethe with misogyny, illustrating how utterly ineffective his ethical code is. “She didn’t let me smash her during highschool so cool. ima just deepfake u on porn and masturbate to it? CHECKMATE HOE,” one user writes. “It is never better when deepfake kicks in, and you get to make your dream celebrity be a mindless robot, and obey masters orders,” posted another.

Even those who have built a living on the porn industry are alarmed by the havoc deepfake technology could wreak on women’s lives. “The principal concern I have is how quickly the technology is evolving. It’s like a runaway freight train,” warns Viktor Zafirovski, a reviewer at the world’s largest porn directory website. Not only is it increasingly accessible, but they are getting easier to create.We will reach a point when “everyone will have to be paranoid about sharing their image,” says Viktor. And having made a small fortune developing this latest tool in the misogynist’s arsenal, even the man at the helm of the deepfake porn industry agrees. “It will be so convincing, that eventually you can’t identify what’s real and what’s fake,” MDF says. “You know, it’s scary to me as well.”

Underneath this cloak of concern for women, Mr Deepfakes must know that he empowers misogynists every day. “Porn runs the world right now. And it’s not something that I agree with with,” he says. Regardless, it’s something he leverages, even as he strives to distance himself from the culture he enables.

MDF doesn’t like to imagine how his wife would feel “if she found a video of herself on the internet — or maybe even a deepfake porn video of someone she knows”. But there are hundreds of women who, if they visited his site, might have the kind of horrifying realisation he wouldn’t want his loved ones to experience. The most frustrating thing is, he admits to feeling some discomfort. “I think I need to, you know, look deep down and see what I’m okay with,” he reflects. But his site remains live, and he keeps making money from it.