생성형 AI와 '누드ify' 앱의 발전으로 성인 콘텐츠 제작자들의 몸이 무단으로 학습 데이터로 활용되거나 도용되어 심각한 정신적, 경제적 피해를 입고 있습니다. 기존의 딥페이크 논의는 얼굴이 도용된 피해자에게만 집중되었으나, 이제는 자신의 몸이 무단으로 사용되는 성인 배우들 역시 '잊혀진 피해자'로 떠오르며 법적, 사회적 보호가 시급해졌습니다.
번역된 본문
2023년 제니퍼(가명)가 한 비영리단체에서 연구원으로 취업했을 때, 그녀는 자신의 새로운 공식 프로필 사진을 얼굴 인식 프로그램에 넣어보았습니다. 20대 초반이던 시절, 10년 넘게 전에 찍었던 포르노 비디오가 이 기술로 검색되는지 확인해보고 싶었기 때문입니다. 실제로 일부 과거 콘텐츠가 검색되었지만, 그녀가 한 번도 본 적 없는 소름 돋는 영상 하나가 함께 나타났습니다. 바로 그녀의 과거 영상인데, 그녀의 몸 위에 다른 사람의 얼굴이 합성되어 있었던 것입니다. 개인정보 보호를 위해 가명을 사용하는 제니퍼는 “처음에는 그냥 다른 사람이라고 생각했어요”라고 말합니다. 하지만 2013년경에 자신이 직접 촬영했던 비디오의 특유의 화려한 배경을 알아보고서야 깨달았습니다. “누군가 저를 딥페이크에 사용했구나.” 소름 끼치게도, 얼굴 인식 기술이 그녀를 식별해 낸 것은 해당 이미지에 여전히 제니퍼의 특징인 광대뼈, 이마, 턱의 모양 등이 남아 있었기 때문입니다. 그녀는 “마치 다른 사람의 얼굴을 가면처럼 쓰고 있는 것 같다”고 말합니다.
비동의적 친밀 이미지(NCII)라는 광범위한 범주에 속하는 성적 딥페이크에 대한 논의는 대부분 실제로 하지 않은 일을 하고 있거나 자신의 것이 아닌 몸에 얼굴이 합성된 사람들, 주로 인기 유명인들에 초점이 맞춰져 있습니다. 지난 몇 년 동안 더 많은 사람들(주로 여성, 때로는 청소년)이 타겟이 되면서 경각심, 두려움, 그리고 심지어 관련 법안 통과로 이어지기도 했습니다. 하지만 이러한 논의와 사회적 대응은 보통 이미지와 비디오에서 그 얼굴이 합성된 '원본 몸통'의 주인공에 대해서는 관심을 두지 않습니다. 현재 뉴욕에서 정신치료사로 일하고 있는 37세의 제니퍼가 말하듯, “이 몸은 누구의 몸인가?라는 논의는 결코 이루어지지 않습니다.”
수년 동안 그 질문에 대한 대답은 대개 '성인 콘텐츠 제작자'였습니다. 실제로 딥페이크(Deepfake)라는 이름은 2017년 11월, Reddit 사용자 이름 'deepfakes'를 사용하는 누군가가 스칼렛 요한슨, 갈 가돗과 같은 스타들의 얼굴을 포르노 배우의 몸에 합성한 비디오를 업로드하면서 유래되었습니다. 성인 산업을 전문으로 하는 코리 실버스타인 변호사는 딥페이크에서 그들의 몸이 무단으로 사용되는 것은 “항상 일어나는 일”이라고 말합니다. 하지만 최근 생성형 AI가 발전하고 이른바 '옷 벗기기(Nudify)' 앱이 급증하면서 이 문제는 훨씬 더 복잡해졌으며, 제작자들의 미래에는 더욱 위협적이게 되었습니다.
더 이상 포르노 배우들의 몸이 성적인 이미지나 비디오에서 직접, 혹은 식별 가능한 방식으로 도용되는 것은 아닙니다. 대신 그들의 몸은 필연적으로 새롭게 AI가 생성하는 신체가 어떻게 보이고, 움직이고, 연기하는지를 학습하는 '데이터'로 사용되고 있습니다. 이는 포르노 배우들의 작품이 AI 누드 이미지 생성 학습에 사용되고, 결국 그 AI가 그들의 일자리를 빼앗을 수 있기 때문에 그들의 생계와 권리를 위협합니다. 그뿐만 아니습니다. AI의 발전은 사람들이 성인 배우들의 동의 없이 그들의 초상을 완벽하게 재현할 수 있게 만들었고, 이러한 AI 복제본은 실제 배우들이 하지 않을 행동을 할 수도 있습니다. 이는 디지털 분신이 본인이 동의하지 않은 특정 성행위에 가담하거나, 심지어 팬들을 상대로 사기를 저지를 수도 있음을 의미합니다.
성인 콘텐츠 제작자들은 이미 그들의 안전과 권리를 보호하지 않는 사회에 의해 소외되어 있으며, 이러한 최근의 발전들은 그들을 훨씬 더 취약한 위치에 놓이게 합니다. 제니퍼는 자신의 몸이 도용된 딥페이크를 발견한 후 소셜 미디어에 이것이 미치는 심리적 영향에 대해 글을 올렸습니다. “자신의 몸이 동의 없이 사용된 사람에게도 트라우마가 될 수 있다고 묻는 사람을 본 적이 없습니다. 그렇습니다(트라우마가 맞습니다)!” 필자와 대화한 여러 다른 제작자들 역시 자신의 몸이 무단으로 사용되었다는 사실을 알게 된 후 겪는 정신적 고통과, 다른 사람들이 자신의 작품을 불법 복제함에 따라 경제적 타격을 입을 것이라는 두려움을 공유했습니다. 실버스타인 변호사는 “자신의 콘텐츠가 AI를 통해 착취되는 것에 우려하며 이를 보호할 방법을 찾고 있다”며 도움을 요청해 오는 성인 배우들의 연락을 매일 받는다고 전했습니다. 한 법학 교수이자 여성 폭력 전문가는 이러한 제작자들을 비동의적 친밀 이미지(NCII) 딥페이크의 “잊혀진 피해자들”이라고 부릅니다.
When Jennifer got a job doing research for a nonprofit in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see if the tech would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than 10 years before, when she was in her early 20s. It did in fact return some of that content, and also something alarming that she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, but with someone else’s face on her body. “At first, I thought it was just a different person,” says Jennifer, who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy. But then she recognized a distinctly garish background from a video she’d shot around 2013, and she realized: “Somebody used me in a deepfake.” Eerily, the facial recognition tech had identified her because the image still contained some of Jennifer’s features—her cheekbones, her brow, the shape of her chin. “It’s like I’m wearing somebody else’s face like a mask,” she says. Conversations about sexualized deepfakes—which fall under the umbrella of nonconsensual intimate imagery, or NCII—most often center on the people whose faces are featured doing something they didn’t really do or on bodies that aren’t really theirs. These are often popular celebrities, though over the past few years more people ( mostly women and sometimes youths ) have been targeted, sparking alarm, fear, and even legislation. But these discussions and societal responses usually are not concerned with the bodies the faces are attached to in these images and videos. As Jennifer, now 37 and a psychotherapist working in New York City, says: “There’s never any discussion about Whose body is this ?” For years, the answer has generally been adult content creators. Deepfakes in fact earned their name back in November 2017, when someone with the Reddit username “deepfakes” uploaded videos showing faces of stars like Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot pasted onto porn actors’ bodies. The nonconsensual use of their bodies “happens all the time” in deepfakes, says Corey Silverstein, an attorney specializing in the adult industry. But more recently, as generative AI has improved, and as “nudify” apps have begun to proliferate, the issue has grown far more complicated—and, arguably, more dangerous for creators’ futures. Porn actors’ bodies aren’t necessarily being taken directly from sexual images and videos anymore, or at least not in an identifiable way. Instead, they are inevitably being used as training data to inform how new AI-generated bodies look, move, and perform. This threatens the livelihood and rights of porn actors as their work is used to train AI nudes that in turn could take away their business. And that’s not all: Advancements in AI have also made it possible for people to wholly re-create these performers’ likenesses without their consent, and the AI copycats may do things the performers wouldn’t do in real life. This could mean their digital doubles are participating in certain sex acts that they haven’t agreed to do, or even that they’re perpetrating scams against fans. Adult content creators are already marginalized by a society that largely fails to protect their safety and rights, and these developments put them in an even more vulnerable position. After Jennifer found the deepfake featuring her body, she posted on social media about the psychological effects: “I’ve never seen anyone ask whether that might be traumatic for the person whose body was used without consent too. IT IS!” Several other creators I spoke with shared the mental toll that comes with knowing their bodies have been used nonconsensually, as well as the fear that they’ll suffer financially as other people pirate their work. Silverstein says he hears from adult actors every day who “are concerned that their content is being exploited via AI, and they’re trying to figure out how to protect it.” One law professor and expert in violence against women calls these creators the “forgotten victims” of NCII deepfakes. And several of the people I spoke with worry that as the US develops a legal framework to combat nonconsensual sexual content online, adult actors are only at risk of further injury; instead of helping them, the crackdown on deepfakes may provide a loophole through which their content and careers could be stripped from the internet altogether. How deepfakes cause “embodied harms” During his preteen years in the 1970s, Spike Irons, now a porn actor and president of the adult content platform XChatFans, was “in love” with Farrah Fawcett. Though Fawcett did not pose nude, Jones managed to get his hands on what looked like pictures of her naked. “People were cutting out faces and pasting them on bodies,” Irons says. “Deepfakes, before AI, had been going around for quite a while. They just weren’t as prolific.” The early public internet was rife with websites capitalizing on the idea that you could use technology to “see” celebrities naked. “People would just use Microsoft Paint,” says Silverstein, the attorney. It was a simple way to mash up celebrities’ faces with porn. People later used software like Adobe After Effects or FakeApp, which was designed to swap two individuals’ faces in images or videos. None of these programs required serious expertise to alter content, so there was a low barrier to entry. That, plus the wealth of porn performers’ videos online, helped make face-swap deepfakes that used real bodies prevalent by the 2010s. When, later in the decade, deepfakes of Gal Gadot and Emma Watson caused something of a broader panic, their faces were allegedly swapped onto the bodies of the porn actors Pepper XO and Mary Moody , respectively. But it wasn’t just high-profile actors like them whose bodies were being used. Jennifer was “a very minor performer,” she says. “If it happened to me, I feel like it could happen to anybody who’s shot porn.” Since he started his practice in 2006, Silverstein says, “numerous clients” have reached out to report “ This is my body on so-and-so .” Both people whose faces appear in NCII deepfakes and those whose bodies are used this way can feel serious distress. Experts call this type of damage “embodied harms,” says Anne Craanen, who researches gender-based violence at the UK’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an organization that analyzes extremist content, disinformation, and online threats. The term reflects the fact that even though the content exists in the virtual realm, it can cause physiological effects, including body dysmorphia. The face-swapped entity occupies the uncanny valley, distorting self-perception. After discovering their faces in sexual deepfakes, many people feel silenced, experts told me; they may “self-censor,” as Craanen puts it, and step back from public-facing life. Allison Mahoney, an attorney who works with abuse survivors, says that people whose faces appear in NCII can experience depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation: “I’ve had multiple clients tell me that they don’t sleep at night, that they’re losing their hair.” Though the impact on people whose bodies are used hasn’t been discussed or studied as often, Jennifer says that “it’s just a really terrible feeling, knowing that you are part of somebody else’s abuse.” She sees it as akin to “a new form of sexual violence.” The uncertainty that comes with not being aware of what your body is doing online can be highly unsettling. Like Jennifer, many adult actors don’t really know what’s out there. But some devoted followers know the actors’ bodies well—often recognizing tattoos, scars, or birthmarks—and “very quickly they bring [deepfakes] to the adult performer’s attention,” says Silverstein. Or performers will stumble upon the content by chance; some 20 years ago, for instance, the first such client to tell Silverstein her body was being used in a deepfake happened to be searching Nicole Kidman online when she found that one of the results showed Kidman’s face on her porn. “She was devastated, obviously, because they