Yes, You Can! Just combine these two pieces of news to see how easy it is (and maybe start worrying on which end of that sex you may end up).

Update 2018/01/25: check out the “confirmation” linked below

Apparently, there already are cam girl sites where you can upload any picture of any friend, coworker, schoolmate, whatever.. who strikes your fancy, and be routed immediately to watch live sex from the “performer” of that website that looks more like that picture. Great, isn’t it?

Of course, this wonderful service has a big, built-in limit: it is really effective only when, by pure chance, that website does have on their payroll someone who does look like the object of your fantasies. Too bad, right? Wrong!

Don’t worry, because AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked.

More exactly, it is “no longer rocket science” to “paste” frame by frame a face from any digital photograph on the face of the performer of an already existing porn video, to get the same video, just “played” by the person in the picture. See here for an example.

So, if any of your friends, coworkers, etc… ever wants to enjoy YOU starring in any genre of hardcore porn, all they have to do is find someone who will offer this as a service, send them some picture of you, and wait until the processing is done.

What does all this mean, in practice?

First of all, don’t focus too much on porn. There is no limitation to the kind of video you may find yourself in, or to the reasons to do it. Technically speaking, producing fake porn for lust, or fake CCTV footage of you robbing some store for blackmailing is exactly the same thing. As the links above say (read them!) “we’re on the verge of living in a world where it’s trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did”.

Confirmation, seen on 2018/01/25: check out this piece from Motherboard which says:

“Most of [those videos] so far are porn, but some users are also creating videos that show the far reaching implication of a technology that allows anyone with sufficient raw footage to work with to convincingly place any face in any video.”

Second, my own rigorously unqualified feeling is that this is one of many things whose combination may have one effect: to (continue to) push people, particularly young ones, towards the two opposite ends of the “sexual activity” spectrum, rather than stay in some saner middle. On one hand, all these opportunities might just be too much, that is leave people without energies or interest for the real thing. In other, presumably much less cases, and quoting again from the articles above:

“moving from imagination to images on screens does represent a qualitative difference. It perhaps even encourages the sort of obsessiveness that might lead to behavior like stalking or even sexual assault”.