Maria Miller, wants a debate in parliament on whether digitally created nude images should be banned.
This service allows users to dress women in photos using Artificial Intelligence (AI). It quickly spreads on social media.
According to one analyst, the website had over five million visitors in June alone.
Users claim that they have nudified celebrities, including Olympic athletes.
DeepSukebe promises its users that it can reveal the “truth hidden beneath clothes.” It was launched in 2020. It is not clear who is behind it. BBC reached out to the company for comment but did not receive a reply.
Its Twitter page states that it is an “AI-leveraged Nudifier” with the mission to “make all men’s dreams come true.”
In a blog post, developers stated that they are currently working on an even more powerful version.
Serious crime
Ms. Miller stated to the BBC that it was time for a ban on such tools.
“Parliament should have the chance to debate nude or sexually explicit images created digitally without consent. I believe that if this were to happen, the law would be changed.”
She stated that it should be an offense to share sexual images online without consent to reflect the “severe impact on people’s life.”
Software providers who develop such technology are complicit in a serious crime. They should be held responsible for designing their products to stop it from happening.
For six years, she has been campaigning against so-called revenge porn (when nude or explicit images are distributed to others without their consent).
At the moment, making, taking, or distributing without consent intimate sex images online or via digital technology is mainly outside the scope of the law.
“It should be considered a sexual offense to share sexual images online without consent. This is because of the serious impact it has on people’s lives.”
She would like to see the issue included in the Online Safety Bill.
Cease, a campaign group representing the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation (Centre To End All Sexual Exploitation), told BBC that it believed that nudification tools should be addressed in the Bill.
Vanessa Morse, a chief executive, stated that “The law is insufficient in this area.”
She stated that technology designed to humiliate and objectify women must be stopped. That porn sites that profit from the mass distribution of images should be forced to prevent their upload.
She said it was unfair that victims of “often traumatized or humiliated” are currently responsible for removing such images from the Internet.
As far as Nudifiers are concerned, they are not new.
DeepNude was launched in 2019, but its creators pulled the service quickly and offered refunds following backlash.
Nudification tools currently only allow for the creation of naked women. One developer admitted that this was sexist.
They admitted that people could misuse it, but they also said that the world wasn’t ready for such a controversial tool.
Not ethical
However, similar services are still available, with many of them using DeepNude’s source code made public by its original developers.
Many websites produce unprofessional results that are sometimes hilarious or clumsy. The new website, however, uses a proprietary algorithm that one analyst said puts it “years ahead of the rest.”
BBC spoke with a developer of one of the many online nudification tools.
Ivan Bravo admitted that such creations are “not ethical, mainly because of how it’s currently used and how the original developers began advertising it as ‘nude friends.’
“However, it’s not a perfect world. People have always looked for ways to make this possible, so it was only natural that such technology would be created.”
He said that technology could not currently nudify women and was therefore sexist.
Personally, I would also love to see a version that is suitable for nude men or fictional characters such as anime so that everyone can experience this type of adult entertainment.
“The goal of this project is to determine the best uses for this technology within the legal [and ethical] framework.”
Reference: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology
