Advances in deepfake technology: Posting photos of yourself poses a risk

ARS Technica writes:

AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease

AI tech makes it trivial to generate harmful fake photos from a few social media pictures

If you're one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.

If you haven't been paying attention to the rapid progress in AI image generators recently, seeing what we've pulled off above might be very alarming. Basically, computer scientists have figured out how to generate new photorealistic images of anything you can imagine by teaching AI using real photos, and the technology has accelerated rapidly over the past year.

By some counts, over 4 billion people use social media worldwide. If any of them have uploaded a handful of public photos online, they are susceptible to this kind of attack from a sufficiently motivated person. Whether it will actually happen or not is wildly variable from person to person, but everyone should know that this is possible from now on.  

Right now, you can try to take all your photos offline. Maybe that's a good idea. But for some people, like politicians or public figures, it's not feasible. And in other cases, friends may have published photos of you in group settings that are outside of your control.

If there are photos of yourself on the internet, don't antagonize people with computer skills. They can make your life unpleasant or miserable if they are motivated to do so.