The Internet is for (Fake) Porn

by Jennie Rose Halperin

It’s been twenty years since a bunch of puppets sang the Avenue Q tune, “The Internet Is for Porn,” on Broadway (“Why do you think the net was born? Porn! Porn! Poooooooorn!”) The song’s still catchy, and the internet is still for porn; the problem now is that pretty soon, nobody will be able to tell whether the internet porn is real or fake.

As society adapts to new Generative AI tools, a flood of convincing if slightly robotic avatars is surging through the web bringing fake election messages, duped pleas for money from endangered family members, and a stunning amount of fake porn. Taylor Swift is the most famous example, but Amsterdam-based deepfake monitor Sensity estimated that 96% of synthetic media is deepfaked, non-consensual pornography. Regulations to curb the spread of deepfakes are under discussion in China, the EU, the United States, India, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and the U.K. Technology companies are rolling out fixes to make it more difficult to create synthetic media, and embedding tools to discourage bad actors. But in the absence of a global consensus on deepfakes, will these attempted rollbacks prove to be too little, too late?