By some counts, over 4 billion people use social media worldwide. If any of them have uploaded a handful of public photos online, they are susceptible to this kind of attack from a sufficiently motivated person. Whether it will actually happen or not is wildly variable from person to person, but everyone should know that this is possible from now on.

We’ve only shown how a man could potentially be compromised by this image-synthesis technology, but the effect may be worse for women. Once a woman’s face or body is trained into the image set, her identity can be trivially inserted into pornographic imagery. This is due to the large quantity of sexualized images found in commonly used AI training data sets (in other words, the AI knows how to generate those very well). Our cultural biases toward the sexualized depiction of women online have taught these AI image generators to frequently sexualize their output by default.

Edwards, B. (2022, December 9). AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/thanks-to-ai-its-probably-time-to-take-your-photos-off-the-internet/