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transcript

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

I’m Nicholas Kristof. I’m a columnist for “The New York Times.” We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the potential dangers of AI. That includes deepfakes. Before the primary, this year, voters in New Hampshire got a robocall. That sounded a lot like President Biden.

Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.

There’s also a fake video of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump.

This video is obviously fake, and it’s been manipulated. If Taylor Swift ever endorsed Donald Trump in the Grammy Awards, I think this would have been all over the news by now.

But I think there’s a bigger problem that we hear much less about, and that is deepfake, nude photos, and videos. Deepfakes are AI-generated imagery that often uses real people’s faces and identity. There was one study that found that 98 of deepfake videos online are pornographic. And of those, 99 percent of the time those targeted are women and girls. I first got a sense of the scale of this problem from an activist who was trying to fight it.

My name is Breeze Liu, and I am a survivor of online image abuse.

Her story begins back in April 2020 when she was just 24 years old.

I got a message from a friend of mine. He said, drop everything and get on a phone call with me right now. When I called him, he said, I don’t want you to panic. But there is a video of you circulating on Pornhub. And for someone like me who doesn’t even watch porn, I thought it was a joke. So I said, this is not funny, and then he said, I am not kidding. I’m sending you the link. You have to look. I received the link, and there I was. I was on Pornhub.

It was one of the most devastating moments of my entire life. It was a video of me recorded without my knowledge and without my consent. When I saw the video, my head just completely went blank, and I went to the rooftop of my apartment building because the shame was so overwhelming, and I didn’t want to live anymore. So I was getting ready to kill myself and jump off from the rooftop of my building. I didn’t do it because I didn’t want my mom to see me dead. But there were moments in the aftermath in which I felt like I would have been better off dead.

With Breeze, this began as one real video, but then it ended up being deepfaked with more than 800 links all across the internet. In the article I wrote on this topic and in this conversation, you’re not hearing some of the underage girls who were targeted, and you’re not hearing some celebrities talk about it, and that’s because of shame. People are humiliated when they’re shown a fake, incredibly graphic videos of themselves being raped. In general, there’s been some reluctance on the part of victims to speak out. And unfortunately, that tends to perpetuate the problem.

The society puts invisible shackles upon our mind, silencing us through shame. I remember when I was talking to the police and the lawyers, I mean, I just lost my voice, and I completely just froze because it was so devastating. I literally couldn’t even talk about this without shaking and having panic attacks. What it feels like is like you been murdered. You died. A part of you had permanently died. And in order to seek justice, you’re forced to look at the cadaver part of yourself over and over and over and over again, and then you never get justice.

So Breeze poured herself into an effort to try to get the video and the deepfakes off the internet. She contacted hundreds of sites. She’s lobbied platforms to get them to stop linking to these sites and directing traffic to these sites. But it’s just an uphill struggle because these companies are monetizing her.

I did ask Pornhub to take it down. They took it down after I found a lawyer. But for the other malicious websites, some of them just didn’t even respond despite all of our efforts, relentless efforts,........

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