There’s a blueprint for the future, outlined over decades by futurists and SciFi writers, that looks a lot like the one unfolding right now. That plan, with its AI companions, designer babies, and infinite lifespans, has been parceled out over centuries by a group of primarily straight, white men and written into code by their successors. They used to be called transhumanists but today we call them effective altruists, longtermists, executives, and billionaires.
Many see the pioneers of this movement as benevolent forecasters of the singularity, summoners of a cyborg utopia where our ancestors shed their earthly bodies and live forever as one big happy hive mind in the sky. This set of beliefs has become a major driver of innovation, for better or worse. Virtual reality, commercial spaceflight, IVF, and AI replicas are all part of the plan. So is deepfake porn.
One of transhumanism's forebears, Ray Kurzweil, has become something of a human bridge from the fantasies of SciFi to the practical world. As I’ve mentioned before, he’s foreseen the birth of the Internet, wearable computers, and the rise of AI. He’s also spearheaded AI projects as a leader at Google.
Over the past four decades he’s published multiple books, attempting to legitimize the seemingly impossible and often bizarre visions laid out by his philosophical ancestors – again, mostly straight, white men. He couches his prophecies in statistical terms, adding an air of absolute truth with formulas, timelines, graphs, and stats. It’s the sort of speculative forecasting that Silicon Valley can’t get enough of.
Back in the 90s, when I was still just a juvenile delinquent lurking in 18+ chat rooms on the family computer, Kurzweil was laying the groundwork for the future we’re experiencing today. He's often praised for the accuracy of his projections, but there’s one that we don’t give him nearly enough credit for.
Tucked inside one of his early works, 1999’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, there’s a rarely cited prediction of chilling accuracy that I just can’t seem to shake. What it reveals should raise questions about who is authoring our collective future. In a chapter titled “...And Bodies,” under the heading, “The Sensual Machine” Kurzweil seems to predict the future of deepfake porn with disturbing levity.
“Today, lovers may fantasize their partners to be someone else, but users of virtual sex communication will not need as much imagination. You will be able to change the physical appearance and other characteristics of yourself and your partner. You can make your lover look and feel like your favorite star without your partner’s permission or knowledge. Of course, be aware that your partner may be doing the same to you.”
He takes the vision one step deeper in an imagined conversation with a young woman named Molly living in the year 2009. Molly explains to Kurzweil that she caught her husband undressing his ex-girlfriend without her knowledge using “image transformers.” The conversation reads as follows:
YOU KNOW HE CAN UNDRESS ME IN REAL TIME.
Oh yes, of course. The computer is altering your vision in real time.
EXACTLY. YOU CAN CHANGE SOMEONE’S FACE, BODY, CLOTHING, OR SURROUNDINGS INTO SOMEONE OR SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY, AND THEY DON’T KNOW YOU’RE DOING IT.
Hmmm.
ANYWAY, I CAUGHT BEN UNDRESSING HIS OLD GIRLFRIEND WHEN SHE CALLED TO CONGRATULATE HIM ON OUR ENGAGEMENT. SHE HAD NO IDEA, AND HE THOUGHT IT WAS HARMLESS. I DIDN’T SPEAK TO HIM FOR A WEEK.
Well, as long as it was just at his end.
WHO KNOWS WHAT SHE WAS DOING ON HER END.
That’s kind of her business, isn’t it? As long as they don’t know what the other is doing?
2009 feels like ages ago, and still no “image transformers,” but we do have so-called nudify apps that let users non-consensually strip photos with the use of generative AI.
In 2017 a Redditor going by the name deepfakes posted a series of face-swap videos featuring A-listers engaged in pornographic acts. According to Vice, he used generative AI to create involuntary hardcore scenes starring Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift, Aubrey Plaza, and Gal Gadot. Since then, increasingly realistic deepfakes have been used as weapons of extortion and harassment against pop stars, politicians, and high school students. According to one study, non-consensual porn makes up 90 to 95 percent of all deepfakes, with 90 percent of that content featuring unwitting women.
Earlier this year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss her own traumatizing experience with deepfake porn. As a victim of sexual assault, she said, the images of her AI replica being forced to perform oral sex brought back painful memories.
“It’s not as imaginary as people want to make it seem. It has real, real effects not just on the people that are victimized by it, but on the people who see it and consume it,” she said. “And once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It parallels the same exact intention of physical rape and sexual assault, [which] is about power, domination, and humiliation. Deepfakes are absolutely a way of digitizing violent humiliation against other people.”
AOC has since taken up the cause of fighting deepfakes at the federal level, sponsoring the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (Defiance) Act, which unanimously passed the Senate earlier this summer. If signed into law, the bill would allow victims of non-consensual AI porn to sue the people who create and share it. Meanwhile, another bill, known as the Intimacy Privacy Protection Act, seeks to hold companies responsible for failing to remove explicit deepfakes from their platforms (further chipping away at protections put in place by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act).
There is movement at the federal level, but progress is slow and states are beginning to take action while legislation crawls its way through congress. According to a report shared with Wired, 23 states have passed laws against involuntary deepfakes so far. It’s clear that politicians now see this content as a real problem – and they should – but why did it take so long to act? This sort of AI-generated porn has proliferated online for at least the last 7 years and we’ve known of the threat for much longer. Back in 1999, Kurzweil essentially envisioned the nudify apps that have the world in an uproar today.
Despite, or maybe because of, the backlash, Kurzweil hasn’t spilled much ink over deepfakes in recent years; his latest book, The Singularity is Nearer, only makes passing mention of their application in propaganda and film. He also shies away from mentions of sex, explicit “image transformers” in the past, along with another jaw-dropping prediction: the death of sexual assault in virtual worlds.
AI makers will go to great lengths to distance themselves from deepfake backlash. They will say that they’re not responsible for the actions of bad actors, but the trolls churning out malicious dupes have the forefathers of modern AI to thank for their misdeeds. Whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, deepfakes were in the blueprints all along.
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