AI technology, gaming streamers, and deepfake porn create a perfect storm on Twitch
How might you react if you found disturbingly realistic naked images of yourself online, that you never actually took?
Host Elamin Abdelmahmoud tackled that question and more with the help of tech journalists Alyssa Bereznak and Samantha Cole, in response to an ongoing deepfake porn scandal that rocked the world of Twitch last week.
What started out as a typical live-stream quickly evolved into controversy for popular gaming streamer Atrioc, who was observed looking at deepfake porn depicting his fellow streamers and collaborators. The discovery has since prompted a greater discussion online about the impact of such nonconsensual content on female streamers.
Below, the trio get into a bit of what makes this incident different from others like it. For the full discussion, check out the Commotion podcast on CBC Listen, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
What is Twitch and who is Atrioc, anyway?
Twitch is a popular online video streaming platform, where users can broadcast their screen as they're playing video games for anyone to watch. Audiences for these streams can grow to hundreds of thousands of users.
Last week, popular streamer Atrioc accidentally shared his screen while streaming. From there, some people noticed that he had a tab open to something called deepfake pornography – or, porn where someone has used really advanced video-altering techniques to superimpose someone's face onto another person's body.
Internet culture reporter Alyssa Bereznak says that the reaction from Atrioc's fanbase was swift.
"He's an Internet personality who loves to game live…and he has a lot of fans. People follow along, and they become fans of him and get to know him. That's why something as small as tapping away from the game and showing his other tabs can turn into a huge controversy like this," Brezaznik said.
The thing is, up until now he was kind of considered one of the good guys of streaming.
"He collab'd a lot with female gamers – and as you know, in this industry, it's a male-dominated industry and it's harder to break in. And he was just really friendly. I would say he had a 'good guy' attitude, and he wasn't necessarily known for being a 'troll' or being sort of purposely controversial. He was a chill dude who offered little marketing tips on Mondays and is good at gaming," Brezaznik said.
What's the controversy?
Last week, while Atrioc was doing a live stream on Twitch, viewers noted that one particular website he'd viewed recently wasn't like the others.
"He switched over to all the tabs, and it was so fast – which kind of speaks to the fandom of these streamers and how much they're paying attention to people they're watching – but it was so fast you could just see the title of the web page in a tab, and then you could see some images that were small in the tab. But people managed to grab just a screenshot of that, zoom in on it and figure out what he was looking at. And obviously they were right, because he came out and admitted to all of it after it kind of went viral and started leaking," Cole explained.
So, what was so bad about what he had been looking at?
As Cole explained, that tab led to a website selling deepfake porn of female streamers, gamers and cosplayers.
"It was someone who was kind of creating these custom clips of, essentially, what would be like nonconsensual pornography of someone's face on someone else's body, a porn performer's body. So it's nonconsensual all the way around; no one consented to the situation. And that [website] was the chance to buy that from that person and then view it. So that's what he said he did. He saw the ad on Pornhub, he said, and then clicked through and then bought a subscription to this so that he could access that material," Cole said.
What does this technology mean for the future of AI and feeling safe online? Samantha, Alyssa and Elamin tackle the ethics, implications and more in the full discussion from today's show.
You can find it on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.