Yesterday, I watched a video by Vox titled ‘The most urgent threat of deepfakes isn’t politics.’ It got me thinking about how much we post our social life online and how easily it can be misused.
From the video description, emphasis mine:
Deepfakes are often portrayed as a political threat — fake videos of politicians making comments they never made. But in a recent report, the research group Deeptrace found that 96% of deepfakes found online are pornographic. Of those videos, virtually all are of women. And virtually all are made without their consent.
When I post my images online, I open up GIMP, crop 1:1 the required portion of the image, scale it down to 200x200 pixels (or 250x250 pixels if the upload target complaints), strip all metadata, and save it at 50% to 100% quality depending on where I’m posting the image. It’s extra work for sure, but I feel a little safer online. Perhaps there might be a simple way to do this from the terminal using imagemagick, but since I usually crop as well, I prefer using a GUI.
I wonder if it helps fight the algorithms behind deepfakes at all or if it’s just a false sense of security.