A woman in the UK has shared her story of discovering who was behind her deepfake pornographic images. When she spoke with the BBC, the organization withheld her true identity. The woman claimed that an anonymous email account sent her a link to a pornographic website. She saw Photoshopped pictures and a video of herself pretending to have sex with different men when she clicked on the link. The current artificial intelligence (AI) drive n technology had been used to fabricate them.
“I was yelling, sobbing, and furiously going through my phone to figure out what I was looking at and reading.” I was aware that this might actually destroy my life,” the woman said to the BBC.
Deepfaking is a process, which involves projecting a person’s face onto someone else’s using computer editing software. It can often result in convincing, life-like clips that are then used to spread disinformation or malicious content.
The person who had posted the deepfake images on the website asked other users to make fake pornography of her. In exchange for the fakes, the user offered to share more photos of the woman and details about her.
Scrolling through the website, she felt her “whole world fall away”.
The incident happened in 2021 and the woman faced online harassment for years at the hands of strangers online. Her picture was used on several social media platform, including Reddit.
Along with her friend, the woman decided to compile a list of men who could have been responsible for spreading her deepfake pictures. And one particular picture caught her attention and she made a horrible realisation.
The image in the photo was of Cambridge’s King’s College. She distinctly recalled having it stolen and giving it to her closest friend Alex Woolf as her only recipient.
Woolf went on to win BBC Young Composer of the Year in 2012, earn a double first in music from Cambridge University, and make an appearance on Mastermind in 2021.
She said she had always known him to be someone who was understanding of the difficulties faced by women online, and that their shared love of music had allowed them to bond as teenagers.
It was Woolf who had been offering to share more original pictures of the woman in exchange for them being turned into deepfakes.
“He knew the impact that it was having on my life so profoundly. And yet he still did it,” she said while speaking to the BBC.
Woolf was found guilty in August 2021 of obtaining images of fifteen women from social media and posting them to websites with explicit content. In addition to receiving a 20-week prison sentence, he was mandated to compensate each of his victims with one hundred pounds.
Woolf said to the BBC that he is “deeply sorry” for his acts and that he is “utterly ashamed” of the behavior that resulted in his conviction.
“There are no excuses for what I did, nor can I adequately explain why I acted on these impulses so despicably at that time,” he stated.
What Jodie considered to be the “ultimate betrayal and humiliation” was learning what her friend had done.
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