


Every single job interview you ever go for, this might be brought up.

“It affects your interpersonal relations it affects you with getting jobs. The images and videos are difficult to remove from the internet, and new material can be created at any time. Noelle Martin, an Australian activistĪnd the repercussions can stay with victims for life. To this day, I’ve never been successful fully in getting any of the images taken down. “This kind of abuse-where people misrepresent your identity, name, reputation, and alter it in such violating ways-shatters you to the core,” says Noelle Martin, an Australian activist who has been targeted by a deepfake porn campaign. At a psychological level, these videos can feel as violating as revenge porn-real intimate videos filmed or released without consent. The consequences for women and girls targeted by such activity can be crushing. But nothing prevents them from uploading other people’s faces, and comments on online forums suggest that users have already been doing just that. The language on the site encourages users to upload their own face. Y bills itself as a safe and responsible tool for exploring sexual fantasies. And many members of the public remain unaware that such technology exists, so even low-quality face swaps can be capable of fooling people. Some experts argue that the quality of the deepfake also doesn’t really matter because the psychological toll on victims can be the same either way. But to a casual observer, some are subtle enough to pass, and the trajectory of deepfakes has already shown how quickly they can become indistinguishable from reality. Many of the face swaps are obviously fake, with the faces shimmering and distorting as they turn different angles. A user can then select any video to generate a preview of the face-swapped result within seconds-and pay to download the full version. The vast majority feature women, though a small handful also feature men, mostly in gay porn. Once a user uploads a photo of a face, the site opens up a library of porn videos. “Anytime you specialize like that, it creates a new corner of the internet that will draw in new users,” Dodge says. This makes it easier for the creators to improve the technology for this specific use case and entices people who otherwise wouldn’t have thought about creating deepfake porn. It’s “tailor-made” to create pornographic images of people without their consent, says Adam Dodge, the founder of EndTAB, a nonprofit that educates people about technology-enabled abuse. But as the first dedicated pornographic face-swapping app, Y takes this to a new level.

There have been other single-photo face-swapping apps, like ZAO or ReFace, that place users into selected scenes from mainstream movies or pop videos.
