Seventy percent of the “face swapping” apps available in Apple’s and Google’s app stores allowed the generation of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, according to a working paper by researchers at Cornell and Georgetown.
The apps market themselves as playful AI editing tools that can edit a photo to replace someone’s face with that of another person. A typical description for one such tool reads: “Want to make your friends laugh? Then you’ve found the right app!”
The app in question was one of dozens that the researchers found enabled the creation of synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery (SYNCII). In total, they manually tested 155 face swapping apps and found that 109 could create SYNCII. 16 more were rated “partially safe” because they refused some but not all of the researchers’ attempts.
Eric Zeng, a Fritz Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University and co-author of the paper, told Indicator that the scale of the problem was “pretty surprising,” even if “the reasons why weren't quite as surprising.” The underlying AI models were not designed to avoid this use case and neither the app developers nor Apple or Google are applying the necessary precautions, Zeng said.
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