Following the Hayley Atwell leaked naked images, now another controversy ensues the Marvel universe as Scarlett Johansson speaks out against sex videos that feature her likeness.
The Avengers: Endgame star Scarlett Johansson, who is also the highest paid actress of 2018, is one of many actresses and stars that have had their likeness used by sex videos generated by artificial intelligence.
The faces of the actresses – including Scarlett Johansson and Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot – are super-imposed on p-rnographic videos and images using digital editing software.
A website claiming to have real “leaked” footage of Scarlett Johansson has a video depicting graphic sex scenes that have been viewed on major p-rn sites over 1.5 million times. The Washington Post notes Johansson worries it may already be too late for women and children to protect themselves against the “virtually lawless (online) abyss.”
“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” the Black Widow actress said. “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause. . . . The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”
The legal implications surrounding the use of the actresses likeness is just as murky as the underground world surrounding the “deepfake” video themselves as they could fall under parody copyright law or are often too untraceable to investigate. The Post notes the videos and images are “built on public photos, they are effectively new creations, meaning they could be protected as free speech.”
While Civil rights groups are attempting to crack down on what they’re calling “nonconsensual p-rnography,” using similar strategies employed against online harassment, cyberstalking, revenge p-rn and identity theft, often times the creators of these “deepfake” videos are anonymous and disappear.