Personally, I have never been a fan of deepfakes. There was always something fake about them. See what I did there? Anyways, I never found them entertaining, fun, or “enjoyable”. However, a notorious website has shut down after losing a key service provider. MrDeepFakes has shut down as per their website on Monday, according to NPR.
“A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation,” a notice on the site’s homepage read. “We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use,” the page said, adding that the message would be removed in about a week.
Apparently, the site was known for allowing users to upload non-consensual, digitally altered, explicit sexual content — particularly of celebrities. Though there were several instances of nonpublic figures’ likenesses being abused as well.
According to research done by Stanford University and University of California, San Diego, during the month of November of 2023, the site hosted 43K sexual deepfake videos “depicting 3.8K individuals; these videos have been watched more than 1.5B times.”
Of those videos, 95.3 percent of the targets were celebrity women. Go figure.
The study believes that the motivations for such deepfake videos includes sexual gratifications and humiliation. Which is one of the problems we have with internet culture. As a kid, I would hope to get a normally blocked cable channel to come through on a free weekend. Grab a sock and go to town and try not to change the channel in fear of losing it. There is a Friends episodes based on it.
Now, I ain’t trying to kink shame but humiliation fantasies are disgusting to me. I do not like to be, or to, humiliate anyone. I think much of this comes from inability to find people that match our sexual fantasies. However, more of it comes from a darker and more sinister place.
It’s things like this that bother me. Now, I know some people will complain citing “it’s fake. It’s not hurting anyone.” Okay, then we will upload of some chick humiliating you and see how cool you think it is then.