DeepNude: The Controversial App for Making Nudes

It was only a matter of time. Deepfakes took the web by storm. Some celebrated this technology by creating memes and inserting actors into strange situations, but the faces of celebrities in adult videos served as a spearhead. Regardless of the complaints about its destructive potential, the concept of deepfake evolved, and now it's DeepNude's turn, which processes a photo of a woman and turns it into a nude...

Fake nudes are so old that we can't even point to a firm origin. Putting an actress's face on a naked body and distributing it via BBS or usenet was a common practice. But can we really say "was"? The arrival of Photoshop only multiplied the editing possibilities, and in the middle of the deepfakes era, editing itself is becoming obsolete.

The most recent and forceful proof comes from DeepNude, an app "inspired" by the famous X-ray glasses promoted in old magazines from the '60s and '70s. The developer, who goes by "Alberto", explains that he discovered the virtues of generative adversarial networks two years ago and concluded that he could create an equivalent to those glasses.

DeepNude: An App to "Make Nudes"

The official page states that DeepNude works locally, meaning it doesn't connect anywhere or transfer data to the web. The free version covers the nude with a watermark, while the premium edition (per the page, $50) replaces that watermark with a "FAKE" stamp in the top left.

The available technical details show that the program is based on Pix2Pix, a generator known for creating mutant kittens and fake faces from drawings. DeepNude's algorithm was trained on 10,000 nudes, but there's a major restriction: it only works with real women. Every attempt to process men or anime and cartoon women returned something very familiar.

The real question is: How long will DeepNude stay online? At the time of writing, the official page was still up. The download, after being inactive for a while due to server problems, is available again. The Windows version weighs 155MB and the Linux version 195MB. But in both cases, before it can be used, the app will download all kinds of files and libraries, totaling 2.1GB.

After a couple of uses, we can testify that DeepNude works exactly as advertised. As you can see in the image, the interface is very simple. A button to upgrade to Premium (which removes the watermark and, according to the app, costs $99) and another to upload a photo. When you upload a photo, all you have to do is center it and click Transform. Depending on your PC and the uploaded image, the program will take between thirty seconds and five minutes to deliver the result. If the photo is well-lit and properly framed, the result is astonishing. Otherwise, it could give you true nightmare scenes.

As expected, criticism multiplied at record speed. "Apology for revenge porn" is the mildest I've found so far, but some legal representatives say that deepfakes could escape existing laws because they "are not real". On the other hand, experts and professors in artificial intelligence and computer science stress the need to "be much better at detecting deepfakes". Both DeepNude and the wave of programs that will follow optimize their performance through relentless training. If you think I'm exaggerating, remember what Nvidia can do...

Source: VICE