Each method is used – almost always against women – to humiliate, harass or cause shame, among other things. Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s e-security commissioner, says more and more deepfakes are being reported to her office Complaints procedure for image abuse, among other AI-generated content such as “synthetic” child sexual abuse and children using apps to create sexualized videos of their classmates. “We know it’s a form of abuse that is really underreported,” Grant said.
As the number of videos on deepfake websites has increased, content creators such as streamers and adult models have used DMCA requests. The DMCA allows people who own the intellectual property of certain content to request that it be removed directly from websites or search results. More than 8 billion takedown requestscovering everything from gaming to music, were made for Google.
“The DMCA has historically been an important way for victims of image-based sexual abuse to have their content removed from the Internet,” said victims’ rights attorney Carrie Goldberg. Goldberg says newer criminal laws and civil procedures make it easier to remove image-based sexual abuse, but deepfakes complicate the situation. “While platforms typically lack empathy for victims of privacy violations, they do respect copyright laws,” Goldberg said.
WIRED’s analysis of deepfake websites, involving fourteen sites, shows that Google has received DMCA takedown requests for all of them in recent years. Many of the websites only host deepfake content and often target celebrities. The websites themselves include DMCA contact forms where people can directly request content removed, although they do not publish statistics and it is unclear how effective they are at responding to complaints. One website says it features videos of “actresses, YouTubers, streamers, TV personas, and other types of public figures and celebrities.” It hosts hundreds of videos with “Taylor Swift” in the video title.
The vast majority of DMCA takedown requests linked to deepfake websites listed in Google’s data concern two of the largest sites. Neither responded to written questions from WIRED. The majority of the fourteen websites had over 80 percent of complaints that led to content being removed by Google. Some copyright takedown notices sent by individuals indicate the level of distress the videos can cause. “It is being done to humiliate and bully me,” says one request. “I take this very seriously and I will do everything I can to have it removed,” said another.
“It has such a huge impact on someone’s life,” said Yvette van Bekkum, the CEO of Orange Warriors, a company that helps people remove leaked, stolen or unauthorized images shared online, including through DMCA requests. Van Bekkum says the organization is seeing an increase in deepfake content online, and victims are facing barriers to coming forward and asking for their content to be removed. “Imagine you’re going through a job application process and people are Googling your name, and they find that kind of explicit content,” van Bekkum says.
Google spokesperson Ned Adriance says the DMCA process allows “rights holders” to protect their work online and that the company has separate tools for dealing with deepfakes, including a separate form and deletion process. “We have a non-consensual deepfake pornography policy so people can have this type of content that includes their likeness removed from search results,” Adriance said. “And we are actively developing additional safety measures to help those affected.” Google says that when it receives a large number of valid copyright takedowns about a website, it uses them as a signal that the site may not be providing high-quality content. The company also says it has developed a system to remove duplicates of non-consensual deepfake porn once it has removed one copy of it, and that it recently updated its search results to limit the visibility of deepfakes when people aren’t looking for them .