The Download: deepfake porn’s stolen bodies and AI sharing private numbers
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn When Jennifer got a research job in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see whether it would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than a decade earlier. It did, but it also surfaced something she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, now featuring someone else’s face on her body. Conversations about sexualized deepfakes usually focus on the people whose faces are inserted into explicit content without consent. But another group often gets ignored: the people whose bodies those faces are attached to. Adult content creators say AI systems are training on their work, cloning their likenesses, and generating explicit content they never agreed to make, all with little legal protection or control. Read the full story on the threat to their rights, livelihoods, and ownership of their own bodies. —Jessica Klein This story is part of our The Big Story series, the home for MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. You can read the rest here. AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers Generative AI is exposing people’s personal contact information—and there’s no easy way to stop it. A software developer started receiving WhatsApp messages asking for help after Gemini surfaced his number. A university researcher got the chatbot to reveal a colleague’s private cell number. A Reddit user says Gemini sent a stream of callers looking for lawyers to his phone. Experts believe these privacy lapses stem from personally identifiable information in AI training data. Chatbots may now be making that information dramatically easier to find. Find out why these breaches are growing—and why there’s little that victims can do to stop them. —Eileen Guo The Tesla Semi could be a big deal for electri