As the role of artificial intelligence looks to continue to grow in our daily lives, it is taking the likeness of humans with it. This week, hundreds of deeply faked videos with faces resembling Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson ran on Facebook and Instagram as part of an apparent advertising campaign for a AI deepfake app called FaceMega.
NBC News broke the story and reported that 230 videos were run on Facebook and Instagram. 127 of the ad videos featured Watson, while 74 videos featured Johansson, all of which featured the actresses in provocative situations and had sexually oriented themes.
The campaign was apparently an ad for FaceMega, and for $8 a week, users can swap faces of a person in a video with photos uploaded to the app. FaceMega appears to have since been pulled or deleted from the Apple App Store, but is still available Google Play Store.
“This could be used with high school students in public schools who are being bullied,” Lauren Barton, who uploaded a screenshot of one of the videos to Twitter, told NBC News. “It can ruin someone’s life. They can have problems at work. And this is extremely easy to do and free. All I had to do was upload a picture of my face and I had access to 50 free templates. “
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The ads seem to go against the app’s own Terms and Conditionswhich states that users must not “act deceptively or impersonate any person or organization.”
NBC News says the promotion comes from app developer Ufoto Limited, which is owned by Wondershare, its Chinese parent company.
In January 2020 Press release, Meta claimed it was tightening its grip on manipulated content — the company was referring specifically to the growing popularity of deepfakes. Meta said it would remove manipulated videos and photos that are edited in ways that will deliberately deceive the average person, or in cases where an AI overlays content onto a video.
“Our policies prohibit adult content, whether generated by AI or not, and we have restricted this site from advertising on our platform,” Meta told Gizmodo in an email.