Deepfake Econ

A while back, after reading Steve's review of The Northman, I did a Brave image search on the actress Anya Taylor-Joy to see if I recognized her from anything else.

. . . and was treated to a buttload of pr0n!

Eeesh, I thought. Is Anya Taylor-Joy a crossover star and somehow this hasn't attracted much commentary? But no, not according to anything I could find.

More recently, I found something similar for the actress Emilia Fox. (That's a link to her IMDB profile, not to Brave results. Do Your Own Research, pervball.) In this case, the images were less deepfakes and more bad Photoshop, but still.

This kind of thing is somewhat anomalous. For instance, image searches on Scarlett Johansson or Valerie Kaprisky* show only official gala pictures.** So why pr0n for some actresses and not others?

Possibilities:

• Perhaps the actresses have licensed their images for this purpose? Maybe it pays well enough that not-quite- or not-yet-famous actresses find the offer attractive when they don't actually have to do any work. Maybe there's no such thing as bad publicity. But I would think that cooperating with this business would be damaging if it were revealed.

• Perhaps already-famous actresses pay to have the images removed. I appears from the URLs that there are only a handful of sites that traffic in this stuff. Still, I would think that the production of these images has got to be a legal gray area at best, and shaking down actresses looks enough like blackmail that someone should have been prosecuted by now.

• The choice of actresses is driven by The Algorithm. But if so, it must be based on something other than fame per se. For instance, perhaps deepfake production focuses on actresses who do not already have a large corpus of nude movie scenes. But honestly, this is where the research gets a little harder to justify to anyone purusing my browser history.

Any other ideas?

* Note that Φ may not have kept up especially well with who the "hot" actresses are over the last few decades.

UPDATE: Looks like I was scooped. Apparently celebrities are not authorizing these images.

** Which is not to say they don't exist, only that they don't show up on the first page of search results for the actresses name alone.