Today, you can strip anyone naked in seconds using a simple camera and a little AI. Creepy !
Imagine: one day, while you are surfing the Web, you discover photos or videos of a sexual nature where you appear completely naked, or even in “action”, freely circulating on pornographic sites or in group conversations. However, these photos never existed. These are what we call deepfakes, photos and videos modified or generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to depict people, most often women, in situations for pornographic purposes and, of course, without their consent. Many celebrities, but also ordinary people, regularly pay the price.
Long reserved for a handful of people who have mastered the subtleties of computing and artificial intelligence, deepfakes can be made by anyone in a few seconds, using applications available on the Play Store or the App Store. Today, with the development of AI, there is even a camera capable of instantly generating a naked image of anyone. Called NUCA, it is presented as a “design and speculative art project” by its creators Mathias Vef and Benedikt Groß. And, contrary to what you might think, it is not very complicated to make…
The case was produced using a 3D printer, to which a 37mm wide-angle lens was attached. When the device takes a photo, it sends it to a server which uses an algorithm to analyze the subject and derive a short descriptive text including their gender, age, ethnicity, etc. This is used as a “prompt” for the Stable Diffusion image generative AI, which produces a naked body. All that remains is to use a face replacement tool to “paste” that of the subject onto the naked body, and that’s it! In this entire process, only the first phase – the transition from image to text – was created especially for the project. Everything else already exists and is available online.
The NUCA is presented in a colorful and cheerful promotional video, with pop colors – a real marketing product! But, rest assured, fortunately it will never be commercialized.
Its goal is simply to raise the question of the devastating potential of AI, particularly regarding consent and the societal impacts of images generated by these tools. Because, behind the pop colors and the light atmosphere of the video, there is in fact a terrifying reality, which the two men come to question: the ease with which we can today strip people naked against their will. And this is the main message that these whistleblowers want to deliver.