The cases of deep fakes and deep nudes that the media are discussing today are a sign of a very complex phenomenon that we will have to train ourselves to deal with in the near future.
Many famous women suddenly discovered that fake photos of them were circulating online in which their face had been combined with a naked body. Just for the recordHandle mentions the names (authentic) and bodies (reworked) of Francesca Barra, Andrea Delogu, Caterina Balivo, Diletta Leotta, Selvaggia Lucarelli, Sophia Loren, Angelina Mango, Elisabetta Canalis, Arisa, Michelle Hunziker, Maria Elena Boschi and Cristina D’Avena. In practice, while each of them was carrying out their professional and personal commitments, someone had fun creating these fake images thanks to artificial intelligence and spreading them online. Thanks to the use of apps, this operation does not require any specific technical skills. The cost to activate very advanced functions on these apps is negligible, allowing anyone to virtually undress a person starting from a photo of them.
Now many applications that offer this function have been blocked but there are still many escape routes to this ban.
This fact once again presents us with an urgent question: can the choice of whether or not to carry out a forgery action like this be left to the will of the individual? Obviously the answer is negative because the danger that similar events could happen again is quite probable. In Italy there is a law and there is a guarantor for what happens online, but digital evolution is progressing on a global scale and at a very rapid pace and the possibility of carrying out illicit acts, as happened in this case, is still very high. If in real life, stealing someone’s naked photos is very complex and exposes you to a very high risk of being intercepted and convicted (unfortunately this doesn’t always happen and unheard complaints for revenge porn are a sad wound still to be healed), doing so through artificial intelligence is child’s play.
It is clear to everyone that ethical dilemmas about what is permissible to do or not to do with artificial intelligence are at the center of global priorities today. Not everything that artificial intelligence can do is good and what has involved many women in this deplorable act of abuse on their image is an example of this. But the ethical dilemma arises every day for millions of human beings, first of all young people who have to build their ethical vision of living while living in a very complex time.
We globally express our solidarity with the women protagonists of this serious affair and as the first concrete gesture of closeness we decide not to go looking for their photos. While waiting for a global policy that protects what can and cannot be done online too Let’s start training today in choosing how to behave in our virtual life. Each of our likes or views is a small drop that affects the evolution of the web. Let’s use this power responsibly.
