By Chinua Okafor(Click to follow me)
- A new generation of deep fake bots.
- “Talk about brief nudity”
The Italian Data Protection Authority began an examination of the prevalent use of bots that spawn counterfeit nude images on the messaging app Telegram.
An investigation by the security firm Sensity, gathered that as of July 2020 over 100,000 of these kinds of images were produced and popularized through public Telegram channels.
It was discovered that these bots can generated fake nudes that included watermarks or only displayed partial nudity, and it asked users to pay to “reveal” the whole image. Some users were even able to upload photos of any woman to the bot and it then returns a version of the photo back to them with all clothing and coverage “removed” and with no sign that the photo had been manipulated.
Sensity also reported, some degree of the bot-generated images, majority of which were sourced from unsuspecting social media accounts and their users were then manipulated, majority of the victims “appeared to be underage.”
The software called DeepNude was responsible for the nude photos and it surfaced online last year. The creator of this app took it down on the grounds that probability of misuse was very high. Although it is really enigmatic to try and understand why anyone would want to create an app that generates nude photos of people I mean hello anyway, according to Sensity, the software has been reverse-engineered and is widely accessible on exposed source repositories and torrenting websites.
“The ease of use of this program makes anyone with a photo on the web potentially victims of deep fakes,” the Italian agency stated on Friday (in Italian) publicizing its exploration into the matter. It seems Telegram will have to provide additional evidence to validate whether it’s in compliance with data protection regulations, according to its statement.