Report: Online ‘deepfake’ videos mainly involve nonconsensual pornography

Thousands of manipulated videos, known as deepfakes, are circulating online and a new government report said most of them are pornographic.

The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said “deepfakes could influence elections and erode trust but so far have mainly been used for non-consensual pornography.”

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The report said while researchers and technology companies have come up with detection tools for deepfakes, more still needs to be done.

"It's pretty much the wild west right now in terms of trying to deal with these,” Director in Science, Technology Assessment and Analytics for the GAO Karen Howard said. "Non-consensual pornography is the widest usage of this right now. Obviously, a quick and easy profit motive or misinformation, public humiliation motive."

Deeptrace Labs is a company that studies deepfake videos and it found that 96 percent of the videos involved deepfake pornography, often targeting female celebrities.

The GAO report also said researchers need to come up with a way to automatically detect these deepfakes because for now, they generally have to be flagged by someone before they are investigated.

"That of course takes time so if a video is up on the internet for hours or days while that process is occurring, a great deal of damage could be done through misinformation,” Howard said.

The GAO report was created for Congress and is meant to give lawmakers a better idea of the threats posted by deepfake videos.

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