For over 20 years, the celebrity "fake porn" website Cfake has served as a bastion of pornographic content allocation for those interested in a specific type of porn: celebrity fakes. In most cases, celebrity fakes are just "bodyshots" taken from pornographic photoshoots such as nude modelling or hardcore porn, which have the "headshots" of celebrities chosen by the faking artist pasted over them, usually in Photoshop or similar image-editing software, so that it creates a fantasy-based, parodic image of whoever the faking artist chooses in a variety of poses and positions. In recent years, however, the rise of generative AI has enabled two new kinds of fakes to enter onto the scene — deepfakes, and AI-generates fakes which resemble that celebrity — and the TAKE IT DOWN Act has begun to rear its poorly-worded head in regards to today's topic.
Cfake has never had very strong policies limiting its content. All of its gallery images are user-uploaded with few rules about what isn't allowed, although it's always seemed to be kept to a fairly high standard in terms of image quality, usually borrowing images from other faking artist's personal websites or uploads when not presumably uploaded by that artist themselves. However, this means they allow — or did allow — AI-generated and deepfake images in their user uploads, and this is an area TAKE IT DOWN seeks to address.
You can read the full text of what comprises the TAKE IT DOWN Act here. It's short, simple, but maybe too simple. The spirit of this Act was to address cases of revenge porn and something like personal deepfakes being uploaded and used for public humiliation. Cfake has always branded itself as a fantasy-based, parodic site where the fakes are not intended to cause any harm or distress or represent reality whatsoever, and that's always flown fairly well. The website's been up for almost/over 20 years, after all.
On June 12th, however, the domain was officially seized by the Department of Homeland Security Investigations in regards to a seizure warrant of the domain issued by the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, as part of an ongoing investigation of apparently international concern, with all content replaced with their official seizure notice:
This is noted as being specifically in regards to the TAKE IT DOWN Act. So, questions are raised:
- Where are the owners of Cfake now, who have been operating the site for two decades? Will they face any charges for it? What, actually, is the result of this?
- What launched the investigation? Was it because Cfake allowed deepfakes? Is this in regards to ALL celebrity faking? Is non-deepfaked, non-AI celebrity faking going to be subject to this thing now? Were there specific complaints from public figures which drew attention to Cfake specifically and got the whole thing seized as a result?
- Is it the fact that this website served an international audience? How does that affect the severity of any charges filed in this case?
I'll have to do research into New Jersey law and see if I can dig up any public records relating to the investigation. If there are charges filed, it should be public court record somewhere, but if it's simply an ongoing investigation, it's possible all they did was seize the domain and they haven't tracked down anyone to charge whatsoever.
Still, dark days for celebrity faking. TAKE IT DOWN is already vaguely-worded, and celebrity faking was nowhere near the intended purview or usage of this act as a concept. If they can use it to take something like this down, what else can they stretch it to encompass?