Julia, 21, has received fake nude photos of herself generated by artificial intelligence. The phenomenon is exploding.
“I’d already heard about deepfakes and deepnudes (…) but I wasn’t really aware of it until it happened to me. It was a slightly anecdotal event that happened in other people’s lives, but it wouldn’t happen in mine”, thought Julia, a 21-year-old Belgian marketing student and semi-professional model.
At the end of September 2023, she received an email from an anonymous author. Subject: "Realistic? “We wonder which photo would best resemble you”, she reads.
Attached were five photos of her.
In the original content, posted on her social networks, Julia poses dressed. In front of her eyes are the same photos. Only this time, Julia is completely naked.
Julia has never posed naked. She never took these photos. The Belgian model realises that she has been the victim of a deepfake.
They are humiliated only because society has fed them the idea that what they’ve done (in this case not done but happened to them) is wrong. Internalizing shame meted out by society is the real psychological problem we need to fix.
Society does indeed play a big role, but if someone went around telling lies about you that everyone believed regardless of how much you denied it, that would take a toll on you.
That’s what I meant. Why should it be shameful? If it weren’t, those photos would lose so much of their harm.
Who are you tell people how they ought to feel? The desire for privacy is perfectly normal and you are the one trying to shame people for not wanting naked pictures of themselves everywhere.
That’s fair.