Some experts argue that the quality of the deepfake also doesn’t really matter because the psychological toll on victims can be the same either way. But to a casual observer, some are subtle enough to pass, and the trajectory of deepfakes has already shown how quickly they can become indistinguishable from reality. Many of the face swaps are obviously fake, with the faces shimmering and distorting as they turn different angles. A user can then select any video to generate a preview of the face-swapped result within seconds-and pay to download the full version.
The vast majority feature women, though a small handful also feature men, mostly in gay porn. Once a user uploads a photo of a face, the site opens up a library of porn videos. “Anytime you specialize like that, it creates a new corner of the internet that will draw in new users,” Dodge says. This makes it easier for the creators to improve the technology for this specific use case and entices people who otherwise wouldn’t have thought about creating deepfake porn. It’s “tailor-made” to create pornographic images of people without their consent, says Adam Dodge, the founder of EndTAB, a nonprofit that educates people about technology-enabled abuse. But as the first dedicated pornographic face-swapping app, Y takes this to a new level. There have been other single-photo face-swapping apps, like ZAO or ReFace, that place users into selected scenes from mainstream movies or pop videos.
