My name is Amelia Leopold. I am a junior economics major. This year, I had the opportunity to be a content management intern at the Deeptrust Alliance.
The Deeptrust Alliance is the only global nonprofit organization fighting the threat of malicious deepfakes. Deepfakes are manipulated visual or audio content created by machine learning algorithms that create extremely realistic images and video. The overwhelming majority of deepfake videos—96% of them, in fact—are pornographic. In these videos, the face of a woman, usually a celebrity, is transposed onto a porn video without consent. Deepfake porn harms women in several ways. It is a form of misogynistic harassment that can threaten their safety, damage women’s reputations, and silence those who are outspoken. We’ve seen examples of all three.
DTA seeks to combat this problem through the development of best practices, policy and ethics. Because no single person, company, or country can overcome the problem of deepfakes alone, DTA has convened a network of tech, government, security and industry stakeholders who seek to mitigate the harm caused by deepfakes.
Currently, we’re developing a strategy for how to tackle such a large and complex problem. To this end, I’ve written policy research documents, contributed to the development of a strategic plan (mission, vision, values, goals, and tactics), and written a published report on deepfake pornography. We have determined that mission #1 is the mitigation of deepfake pornography, because of the prevalence and extent of the problem, and because of the terrible harms it causes. For these reasons and others, we believe it will provide a strong test case upon which to base effective policy responses to deepfakes more generally. If our solutions work for deepfake porn, we believe it’s likely we’ll be able to use them to combat other kinds of deepfakes, including political deepfakes, election interference, and deepfakes that seek to affect financial markets.
Deepfake pornography is not a single entity; it’s a supply chain. It begins with the creation of content by individuals or entities using specific (targetable) tools. Those individuals and entities benefit financially from distribution networks that can to varying degrees be regulated or supervised. Distribution is facilitated by financial institutions, such as credit card corporations. Finally, content is consumed by individuals. As a supply chain, it can be broken or disrupted using thoughtful policy interventions at any of those points and perhaps others.
With this narrower mission now finalized, the Deeptrust Alliance intends to develop and recommend policy interventions that will disrupt the financial infrastructure that funds the distribution of deepfake porn. This is the first step in building a legislative and policy framework to dismantle the financial incentives around malicious disinformation.
To continue to learn about DeepTrust Alliance’s important work, follow us on Twitter @trust_deep and on LinkedIn.
Experiences like Amelia’s are made possible by the Whitman Internship Grant, which provides funding for students to participate in unpaid internships at nonprofit, some for-profit, and government organizations. We are happy to be sharing blog posts from students who were supported by either a summer, fall, spring, or year-long grants at organizations, businesses, and research labs all around the world. To learn how you could secure a Whitman Internship Grant or host a Whitman intern at your organization, send an email to Assistant Director for Internship Programs, Mitzy Rodriguez
So proud if you! Great cause!! 🤩 💕💖