Man Arrested For Uncensoring Japanese Porn With AI In First Deepfake Case

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Japanese police on Monday arrested a 43-year-old man for using artificial intelligence to effectively unblur pixelated porn videos, in the first criminal case in the country involving the exploitative use of the powerful technology. Masayuki Nakamoto, who runs his own website in the southern prefecture of Hyogo, lifted images of porn stars from Japanese adult videos and doctored them with the same method used to create realistic face swaps in deepfake videos. But instead of changing faces, Nakamoto used machine learning software to reconstruct the blurred parts of the video based on a large set of uncensored nudes and sold the content online. Penises and vaginas are pixelated in Japanese porn because an obscenity law forbids the explicit depictions of genitalia.

Nakamoto reportedly made about $96,000 by selling over 10,000 manipulated videos, though he was arrested specifically for selling 10 fake photos at about $20 each. Nakamoto pleaded guilty to charges of copyright violation and displaying obscene images and said he did it for money, according to NHK. He was caught when police conducted a 'cyber patrol,' the Japanese broadcaster reported. 'This is the first case in Japan where police have caught an AI user,' Daisuke Sueyoshi, a lawyer who's tried cybercrime cases, told VICE World News. 'At the moment, there's no law criminalizing the use of AI to make such images.' For example, Nakamoto was not charged with any offenses for violating the privacy of the actors in the videos.

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