"What do you expect? You're part of the internet": Analyzing Celebrities' Experiences as Usees of Deepfake Technology

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how celebrities perceive and navigate the harms caused by non-consensual deepfake images, highlighting infrastructural barriers and social factors that hinder recourse and activism.

Contribution

It introduces a critical discursive psychological analysis of celebrity experiences with deepfakes, emphasizing infrastructural and social obstacles to addressing NSII and proposing HCI interventions.

Findings

Celebrities experience distress and harm from deepfake targeting.

Social and infrastructural factors hinder activism and recourse.

False beliefs online facilitate deepfake abuse.

Abstract

Deepfake technology is often used to create non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery (NSII), mainly of celebrity women. Through Critical Discursive Psychological analysis we ask; i) how celebrities construct being targeted by deepfakes and ii) how they navigate infrastructural and social obstacles when seeking recourse. In this paper, we adopt Baumers concept of Usees (stakeholders who are non-consenting, unaware and directly targeted by technology), to understand public statements made by eight celebrity women and one non-binary individual targeted with NSII. Celebrities describe harms of being non-consensually targeted by deepfakes and the distress of becoming aware of these videos. They describe various infrastructural/social factors (e.g. blaming/ silencing narratives and the industry behind deepfake abuse) which hinder activism and recourse. This work has implications in recognizing the roles of various stakeholders in the infrastructures underlying deepfake abuse and the potential of human-computer interaction to improve existing recourses for NSII. We also contribute to understanding how false beliefs online facilitate deepfake abuse. Future work should involve interventions which challenge the values and false beliefs which motivate NSII creation/dissemination.