The period of time from the mid-20th century up until right now has often been called the “Information Age.” It’s defined by the massive amount of technological progress over the last century, which has brought anything and everything we could ever want right to our fingertips. News, pop culture, weather, porn—if we desire it, we can have it at the speed it takes to type in a request on our phones.
But perhaps more than any one piece of real data, humanity has been characterized over the last decade by its ability to sift through deception. What is and is not real continues to be the question that hovers above all of politics. Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence suckers in an entire Twitter feed of impressionable users every five minutes, handing over their facial map to see what they might look like as a renaissance painting.
A more appropriate way to categorize this current state would be the “Disinformation Age,” where nothing is ever quite what it seems. Deepfake technology is the most pertinent calling card of this new era. That tech, which collects facial mapping data from a wealth of photos of the same person, allows one person’s face to be plastered upon someone else’s body. Despite being the subject of social experiments and absurd meme videos, deepfake technology has become an epidemic that presents real dangers, both political and personal.
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The latter is a subject of Another Body, a new documentary out of SXSW, that chronicles one woman’s intense reaction to finding out that her face had been deepfaked onto several porn videos. While examining the legal ramifications—or lack thereof—of this kind of violation, the film itself implements deepfake technology to protect the identities of both the victims and perpetrators, giving us a taste of just how insidiously smart the tech really is. By taking an intimate approach to exploring a problem that grows larger every day, Another Body becomes a terrifying analysis of our crumbling sense of autonomy, in an inextricably digital age.
(Disclosure: Allegra Frank, a Daily Beast’s Obsessed editor, is a member of the SXSW documentary jury. She was not involved in coverage of any documentaries or editing of the story.)
"Another Body."
Willa ProductionsAt the start of the film, we’re introduced to Taylor Klein via a video diary, shortly after she’s found out that her face has been deepfaked onto porn videos, on sites like Pornhub and Xhamster. Taylor, the latest in her family’s long line of engineers, had only just graduated college when she received a Facebook message from a classmate, linking her to one of the videos. “It was just shocking, seeing my face looking at the camera, basically making eye contact with me,” she explains.
But it wasn’t just Taylor’s face that had been compromised. Her full name, hometown, and college were all present, either in the porn video titles or details of the specific accounts hosting the content. She began to be inundated with messages from men on social media, sending lewd and lascivious correspondence about them living nearby, or wanting to meet up with her when they were in town. Naturally, she became worried for her own safety, while already trying to handle the emotional and physical toll of being the victim of nonconsensual pornography.
Shortly into Another Body, Taylor reveals that the person we’ve been watching in video diaries, professionally lit confessionals, and photos, is not the real Taylor. In fact, Taylor doesn’t exist. All of the footage we’ve seen of “Taylor” so far is the real-life target of this instance of abuse, but her name and face have been changed to protect her identity. Instead, an actor’s face was deepfaked onto “Taylor’s,” in order to bring her story to the public.
This revelation—which is not a spoiler to the film itself—presents a disturbing sense of surreality. Audiences see just how seamlessly the film’s deepfake artist, Fernando Sánchez Liste, is able to cycle between different faces. Each one fits perfectly atop the body that we’ve been watching already; the average person wouldn’t question its authenticity if they weren’t told it was artificial.
While not all deepfakes are as indisputable as the ones professionally made by the graphic effects artists for Another Body, their ease of application is the film’s defining predicament. If it’s this simple to toss someone else’s face onto another person’s body, wouldn’t the potential ramifications be so clear that the government and law enforcement would do everything in their power to stop the spread?
Unfortunately, as the film notes, deepfakes have become their own epidemic. Millions have already made their way online, and no one is safe. What’s more, only a handful of states currently have laws against deepfakes as a form of nonconsensual pornography. While 48 states have adopted laws against revenge porn, only three states have specific deepfake laws: Texas, Virginia, and California. Only the latter two of those three states specify legal consequences for nonconsensual deepfake pornography.
Taylor Klein did not happen to live in either of those two states, meaning that her chase for justice would have to be entirely self-guided. “We were basically playing phone tag with the police for a couple of weeks,” Taylor says. “[The detective] asked, ‘What have you done to cause someone to do this to you?” And after a decent dose of victim blaming, Taylor explains that the detectives simply told her that the deepfakes were wrong, but that there is nothing that can be done, as the perpetrator didn’t break any laws.
Bolstered by her desire to control how others perceive her, Taylor embarks on her own quest to find out who deepfaked her. Along the way, she finds out that she’s not the only person in her class grappling with this. Another engineering student, “Julia,” had also been deepfaked in several porn videos. Once the two of them discover that they’ve both had their faces stolen, they posit that it was done by a mutual friend of theirs, and link up in the darkest recesses of the internet to search for answers.
Occasionally, Another Body’s insularity can feel frustrating. It doesn’t probe far enough into the reasons why the ramifications of deepfakes are so damaging, beyond Taylor and Julia’s intense personal distress. The film touches on the potential consequences that Taylor or Julia could potentially face in the real world due to their deepfakes, but only skims the surface of the potential damage. Sex workers already face discrimination both systematically and socially, from employers, banks, families, politicians, and friends. Even if sex work is nonconsensual via a deepfake, the victims of them are liable to face that same discrimination.
Despite remaining focused on Taylor and Julia, Another Body still transcends the coldness of all of the technology that its directors implement to tell its story. These victims are very real, and even if we never see their true faces or know their real names, it doesn’t mean that their lives weren’t consumed by synthetic images of themselves. Another Body takes the time to ponder whether self-control and identity are merely illusions in the Disinformation Age. What’s real and what isn’t, and how do we sift through the rubble of our personhood to find the connection between the two? Despite our faces being fodder for the world, it’s our determination for the truth that remains humanity’s most powerful asset when it comes to navigating whatever may lie ahead.
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