On Monday, popular Twitch streamer Brandon Ewing, who goes by Atrioc, streamed himself crying profusely, tearfully apologizing for creating and consuming “deepfake porn” of fellow streamers—all women. The apology came after earlier in the day, he’d accidentally revealed tabs in his browser that revealed that he was looking at artificially generated porn of popular female Twitch streamers. In his apology, Ewing claimed that he’d come across a website offering AI-created porn while browsing Pornhub, and, out of “morbid curiosity,” paid for a subscription to view the pictures.
This type of porn is neither new nor, unfortunately, especially rare. With AI, people can create pornographic images of friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and even strangers they meet in passing, and alarmingly enough, they can easily do so without the consent or knowledge of the person whose image and likeness they’re using.
The possibilities spawned by AI have essentially become limitless at this point, though many of the images we’re seeing circulated across social media—of computer-generated women with comically huge breasts and creepily formed fingers—aren’t exactly believable. Twitter has become awash with these images, many of which anyone who’s met a woman before can spot as comically fake. As some have pointed out, they’ll likely become fodder for varying scams preying on horny men in the near future. But deepfake porn diverges from this bizarre yet relatively innocent phenomenon, because it targets real-life women.
Last month, the popular AI art app Lensa briefly took the internet by storm, with many outlets—including Jezebel—noting its creepy tendency to create sexualized and otherwise problematic images of women and girls. In a Wired report on the app, Olivia Snow, a research fellow at UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, observed that, when she uploaded childhood photos of herself to Lense, “What resulted were fully nude photos of an adolescent and sometimes childlike face but a distinctly adult body.”
The dissemination of AI-generated nude or sexual images of real people carries massive potential ramifications, and can affect victims’ employment or render them vulnerable to traumatizing sexual harassment. Most states have adopted varying anti cyber-exploitation laws in recent years to rein in “revenge porn,” or nonconsensual nude images of individuals shared by former partners or harassers. But only California, Virginia, and Texas specifically prohibit deepfake content. The rise of fake porn—including images that could depict children—will inevitably push the boundaries of the ongoing cyber sexual exploitation crisis, possibly beyond what we can even imagine.
That the mounting issue of AI porn has been propelled into the news by the actions of a male Twitch streamer is especially disturbing given how prevalent sexual harassment targeting female Twitch streamers already is. Women streamers face traumatizing stalking, objectification, and unwanted sexualization, and intentionally or not, Ewing has introduced many possible internet perverts to the options available to them to further attack and prey on these women. Some of the women streamers Ewing appeared to be looking at, as well as other highly visible women on Twitch, have since spoken out about how his actions have impacted them.
“Fuck Atrioc for showing it to thousands of people. Fuck the people DM’ing me pictures of myself from my website. Fuck you all. This is what it looks like, this is what the pain looks like,” one streamer, QTCinderella, said in a Monday stream. “It should not be part of my job to have to pay money to get this stuff taken down. It should not be part of my job to be harassed, to see pictures of me ‘nude’ spread around.”
Sweet Anita, another streamer whom Ewing appeared to be looking at fake photos of, addressed the controversy in a Monday tweet. “I literally choose to pass up millions by not going into sex work and some random cheeto encrusted porn addict solicits my body without my consent instead. Don’t know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point,” she wrote, adding: “I just don’t think this should be the price for wanting to entertain people.”