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Largest deepfake porn site shuts down forever
"We will not be relaunching" Largest deepfake porn site shuts down forever Unknown hero pulls the plug on biggest AI porn platform. Ashley Belanger – May 5, 2025 11:41 am | 11 Credit: Marco_Piunti | E+ Credit: Marco_Piunti | E+ Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more The most popular online destination for deepfake porn shut down permanently this weekend, 404 Media reported. "Mr. Deepfakes" drew a swarm of toxic users who, researchers noted, were willing to pay as much as $1,500 for creators to use advanced face-swapping techniques to make celebrities or other targets appear in non-consensual pornographic videos. At its peak, researchers found that 43,000 videos were viewed more than 1.5 billion times on the platform. The videos were generated by nearly 4,000 creators, who profited from the unethical—and now illegal—sales. But as of this weekend, none of those videos are available to view, and the forums where requests were made for new videos went dark, 404 Media reported. According to a notice posted on the platform, the plug was pulled when "a critical service provider" terminated the service "permanently." "Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation," Mr. Deepfakes confirmed, while warning not to trust any impostor platforms that pop up in its absence. "We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed around one week." It remains unclear exactly which service cut off Mr. Deepfakes, but researchers noted that among the "most crucial components" that deepfake creators needed to keep generating the content was "free-tier cloud GPU access" provided through Google Colab notebooks. Google did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment on whether that access was recently yanked. Downfall follows Take It Down Act passing The downfall of Mr. Deepfakes comes just after Congress passed the Take It Down Act, which makes it illegal to create and distribute non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including synthetic NCII generated by artificial intelligence. Any platform notified of NCII has 48 hours to remove it or else face enforcement actions from the Federal Trade Commission. Enforcement won't kick in until next spring, but the service provider may have banned Mr. Deepfakes in response to the passing of the law. Last year, Mr. Deepfakes preemptively started blocking visitors from the United Kingdom after the UK announced intentions to pass a similar law, Wired reported. The shuttering of Mr. Deepfakes won't solve the problem of deepfakes, though. In 2022, the number of deepfakes skyrocketed as AI technology made the synthetic NCII appear more realistic than ever, prompting an FBI warning in 2023 to alert the public that the fake content was being increasingly used in sextortion schemes. But the immediate solutions society used to stop the spread had little impact. For example, in response to pressure to make the fake NCII harder to find, Google started downranking explicit deepfakes in search results but refused to demote platforms like Mr. Deepfakes unless Google received an unspecified "high volume of removals for fake explicit imagery." According to researchers, Mr. Deepfakes—a real person who remains anonymous but reportedly is a 36-year-old hospital worker in Toronto—created the engine driving this spike. His DeepFaceLab quickly became "the leading deepfake software, estimated to be the software behind 95 percent of all deepfake videos and has been replicated over 8,000 times on GitHub," researchers found. For casual users, his platform hosted videos that could be purchased, usually priced above $50 if it was deemed realistic, while more motivated users relied on forums to make requests or enhance their own deepfake skills to become creators. Mr. Deepfakes' illegal trade began on Reddit but migrated to its own platform after a ban in 2018. There, thousands of deepfake creators shared technical knowledge, with the Mr. Deepfakes site forums eventually becoming "the only viable source of technical support for creating sexual deepfakes," researchers noted last year. Having migrated once before, it seems unlikely that this community won't find a new platform to continue generating the illicit content, possibly rearing up under a new name since Mr. Deepfakes seemingly wants out of the spotlight. Back in 2023, researchers estimated that the platform had more than 250,000 members, many of whom may quickly seek a replacement or even try to build a replacement. Further increasing the likelihood that Mr. Deepfakes' reign of terror isn't over, the DeepFaceLab GitHub repository—which was archived in November and can no longer be edited—remains available for anyone to copy and use. 404 Media reported that many Mr. Deepfakes members have already connected on Telegram, where synthetic NCII is also reportedly frequently traded. Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who is a leading expert on digitally manipulated images, told 404 Media that "while this takedown is a good start, there are many more just like this one, so let’s not stop here." Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 11 Comments
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