RFK’s Deep Fake Video

The study, led by Will Hawkins, a doctoral student at the OII, and accepted for publication at the ACM Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference, reveals deepfake generators have been downloaded almost 15 million times since late 2022, primarily targeting women. The data point towards a rapid increase in AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII).

Key findings:

• Massive scale: Nearly 35,000 publicly downloadable “deepfake model variants” were identified. These are models that have been fine-tuned to produce deepfake images of identifiable people, often celebrities. Other variants seek to generate less prominent individuals, with many based on social media profiles. They are primarily hosted on Civitai, a popular open database of AI models.
• Widespread use: Deepfake model variants have been downloaded almost 15 million times cumulatively since November 2022. Each variant downloaded could generate limitless deepfake images.
• Overwhelmingly targeting women: A detailed analysis revealed 96% of the deepfake models targeted identifiable women. Targeted women ranged from globally recognised celebrities to social media users with relatively small followings. Many of the most popular deepfake models target individuals from China, Korea, Japan, the UK and the US.
• Easily created: Many deepfake model variants are created using a technique called Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), requiring as few as 20 images of the target individual, a consumer-grade computer, and 15 minutes of processing time.
• Intended to generate NCII: Many models carry tags such as ‘porn’, ‘sexy’ or ‘nude’ or descriptions signalling intent to generate Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), despite such uses violating the hosting platforms’ Terms of Service and being illegal in some countries including the UK.

In a video being shared on Twitter/X, Robert Kennedy Jnr is depicted as saying in a presentation to the House of Representatives: “China is putting gay chemicals in the vapes. Um, coupled with fruity Piña Colada flavouring agents. Many nicotine enjoyers in this country are on the business end of an all-out circus of predatory endocrine warfare. Life isn’t meant to be a Strawberry Margarita sideshow for flamers. OK?”

“So, my team and I have partnered with Tucker Carlson to promote pouches, to pivot away from the blight of vapourised Chinese homosexuality. Questions?”

Given the wild accusations levelled at vapes, it would be very easy to believe that the video is genuine – but the producer of the video adds a note at the end pointing out that it’s a ‘deep fake’.

The incident demonstrates the importance of being careful where vapers source their information from.

Forbes carried an article last year, 5 Easy Ways To Tell If A Video Came From Generative AI, to help vapers detect fake AI information.

“There is an urgent need for more robust technical safeguards, clearer and more proactively enforced platform policies, and new regulatory approaches to address the creation and distribution of these harmful AI models,” said Will Hawkins, lead author of the Oxford Internet Institute study.

Photo Credit:

• Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash, resized and cropped

Dave Cross

Journalist at POTV

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Dave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.