The shuttering of Mr. Deepfakes won’t solve the problem of deepfakes, though. In 2022, the number of deepfakes skyrocketed as AI technology made the synthetic NCII appear more realistic than ever, prompting an FBI warning in 2023 to alert the public that the fake content was being increasingly used in sextortion schemes. But the immediate solutions society used to stop the spread had little impact. For example, in response to pressure to make the fake NCII harder to find, Google started downranking explicit deepfakes in search results but refused to demote platforms like Mr. Deepfakes unless Google received an unspecified “high volume of removals for fake explicit imagery.”
According to researchers, Mr. Deepfakes—a real person who remains anonymous but reportedly is a 36-year-old hospital worker in Toronto—created the engine driving this spike. His DeepFaceLab quickly became “the leading deepfake software, estimated to be the software behind 95 percent of all deepfake videos and has been replicated over 8,000 times on GitHub,” researchers found. For casual users, his platform hosted videos that could be purchased, usually priced above $50 if it was deemed realistic, while more motivated users relied on forums to make requests or enhance their own deepfake skills to become creators.
Mr. Deepfakes’ illegal trade began on Reddit but migrated to its own platform after a ban in 2018. There, thousands of deepfake creators shared technical knowledge, with the Mr. Deepfakes site forums eventually becoming “the only viable source of technical support for creating sexual deepfakes,” researchers noted last year.
Having migrated once before, it seems unlikely that this community won’t find a new platform to continue generating the illicit content, possibly rearing up under a new name since Mr. Deepfakes seemingly wants out of the spotlight. Back in 2023, researchers estimated that the platform had more than 250,000 members, many of whom may quickly seek a replacement or even try to build a replacement.
Further increasing the likelihood that Mr. Deepfakes’ reign of terror isn’t over, the DeepFaceLab GitHub repository—which was archived in November and can no longer be edited—remains available for anyone to copy and use.
404 Media reported that many Mr. Deepfakes members have already connected on Telegram, where synthetic NCII is also reportedly frequently traded. Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who is a leading expert on digitally manipulated images, told 404 Media that “while this takedown is a good start, there are many more just like this one, so let’s not stop here.”
