'Face-changed' images cause stir online
Deepfake technology has caused a stir, with realistic but completely fake depictions it can produce of celebrities, and images of Hollywood stars including Scarlett Johansson, Emma Watson and Gal Gadot have used for deepfake porn videos.
Websites like ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com have highlighted just how pervasive and creepy the technology is likely to become.
ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com can serve up numerous pictures of different faces, but each face is completely fake and computer-generated.
"Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image from scratch," Zhang Bingbing wrote on his Sina Weibo.
"I was very interested in the website at first, but then I started to worry those images at scale will have a huge effect on how modern societies think about evidence and trust," another Weibo user, Xiao Shudai, held.
Fake videos and audio are getting better, faster and easier to make — and increasing the technology's potential for harm if put in the wrong hands.
To put it another way, websites like ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com may be just the beginning of this new technology, and some more devious uses may come later.
