Real Talk 2nd January 2019 by Valerie Loftus

Scarlett Johansson Is Speaking Out About Her Face Being Used In ‘Demeaning’ Fake Porn Videos

The actress says trying to stop the creation of 'deepfake' videos is a 'lost cause'.

Scarlett Johansson is speaking out about the creepy and demeaning phenomenon of ‘deepfake’ porn, in which women’s faces are superimposed on to porn actors’ bodies.

‘Deepfakes’ use artificial intelligence to insert an image or video on top of another – think of it as a more sophisticated version of SnapChat’s ‘face swap’ function.

It wasn’t long, of course, before the technology was used to create fake pornographic videos of celebrities, with Emma Watson, Daisy Ridley and Gal Gadot amongst those who have been targeted.

Pornographic deepfakes have been banned by sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Pornhub, which treat it as a form of revenge porn. However, non-pornographic videos can still be found all over the place – they have been used in the past in the creation of fake news and internet hoaxes.

Scarlett Johansson is a frequent subject of deepfake porn, and in a statement given to The Washington Post earlier this week, said trying to remove the videos is a “lost cause”.

“Clearly this doesn’t affect me as much because people assume it’s not actually me in a porno, however demeaning it is,” she says. “I think it’s a useless pursuit, legally, mostly because the internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”

This is the latest in a series of privacy breaches for Scarlett – in 2011, her private photos were stolen and leaked by a hacker, who was sentenced to ten years in prison. Six years later, a Hong Kong designer built a life-size robot that looks exactly like the actress, something she references in her Washington Post statement.

Scarlett laments that while she might be able to control the use of her image in the US, the same rules might not apply everywhere else:

Even if you copyright pictures with your image that belong to you, the same copyright laws don’t apply overseas. I have sadly been down this road many, many times. The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause, for the most part.

“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” she concludes.

The internet is a grim place to be a woman. It never ends, does it?

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