Man Arrested For Uncensoring Japanese Porn With AI In First Deepfake Case (vice.com) 73
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.
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.
Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:4)
You must mean "caste", but it's still funny. Both of the other top-level, presumably FP candidate, comments also deserve Funny mods. (As of this writing.)
However it's worth nothing that the birth rate in Japan is well below replacement level. But they still don't want immigrants. They'd prefer to use more robots.
Trying to justify your Subject: Japan is mostly about virtual sex these days. For profit. He was arrested for interfering with the profits. (My theory of the case is that he was violating copyright by reselling the "improved" pron [sic] at higher prices.)
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No timing. None. Humor is almost entirely about timing, and I have none.
I forgot to mention the Japanese sex robots. Not pixilated.
Somewhere near the undesired non-Japanese immigrants to make up the difference. (Returnee immigrants are another special case.)
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Re:Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:4, Funny)
One unintended consequence of the pixel censoring was anime tentacle porn. And Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, because real sex absolutely cannot compete with tentacle porn.
They might not be right, but are they wrong?
Re:Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:5, Informative)
One unintended consequence of the pixel censoring was anime tentacle porn.
Perhaps the anime stuff. But Japanese tentacle erotica [wikipedia.org] predates the Victorian influence on their culture and subsequent censorship laws.
Re:Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:5, Funny)
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And Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, because real sex absolutely cannot compete with tentacle porn.
How would you know?
Re:Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:4)
Japan has a huge problem with population decline, bad enough that they have a government minister in charge of dealing with it.
The censorship laws are just prudishness, and an industry that doesn't really want to change them because it lets them get away with a lot. The actors don't have to look so good down there, they don't even have to have real sex. Strap ons with pneumatic cum pumps make for spectacular movies and the censorship makes it easy to hide. Plus a lot of actors won't work without condoms, but they can pretend otherwise.
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If memory serves me correctly the law was established by MacArthur and was actually pretty permissive for the time period. I really think status quo being god accounts for the rest. You're almost implying that the porn industry has a powerful ability to lobby. Then again, maybe it does.
Re:Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst part is Japan only banned stuff like uncensored porn and prostitution because they didn't want to be colonised by prudish Europeans who would see them as barbarians for it.
Japan was originally (and still is more or less) extremely sexually liberated; they don't have the dumb Christian view that sex is shameful
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Japan was originally (and still is more or less) extremely sexually liberated; they don't have the dumb Christian view that sex is shameful
It's also extremely misogynistic, which is how they can have a penis festival but also cite a woman for paddling a vagina kayak. Yeah, look it up, it's more fun that way.
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It is not misogynistic. The law was set up to protect women in post war Japan from being forced into prostitution and porn by predatory individuals.
It didn't accomplish that, and there are better ways to accomplish that, so I don't buy that argument for even a nanosecond.
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I'm going to ignore bullshit explanations for things that were done, yeah. I do that here, too.
Re: Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:2)
Yet the evidence seems to indicate that Christians continue actively and enthusiastically reproduce?
It's almost like you're disingenuously strawmanning a billion people into a pigeonhole based what even you have to recognize are a teensy minority of cases.
Once must wonder why someone would go to that creative effort to hate a billion people.
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According to Pew, 2.3B Christians in the world, seems high, I had thought there was 1B Catholics, so wanted to look it up to verify.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fa... [pewresearch.org]
According to a BBC article, there are just over 1B Catholics, so I guess that is accurate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
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No, the real western influence is in that they've banned sex and the sexualization of minors, something that's been considered totally fine and normal for for literally centur
Re: Hilariously it's not obscenity laws (Score:2)
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> That's why this nonsense still flies in 2021.
It's not nonsense. I sustain myself purely through jacking off.
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Lol, the blurred parts. Vajayjay bits are banned. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Lol, the blurred parts. Vajayjay bits are bann (Score:3)
The method used to "de-censor" the images is wholly irrelevant to the charges in this case.
I am amazed (Score:5, Funny)
You mean the Japanese really don't all have pixilated genitals?
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GTFO! Don't ruin Japanese porn for me!
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The next HOT NEWS item will be...
Most Japanese women don't scream and cry like wounded animals during sex...unlike the depiction of them in Japanese porn.
You mean, "Sound like Dolphins".
Re: What? (Score:2)
The answers you have so far are incorrect. Japanese law prohibits uncensored genitals so porn has those bits pixelated. This guy used machine learning to unpixelate them.
Color me surprised (Score:3)
I just thought Japanese people had naturally blurry private parts. Live and learn.
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They could probably even reuse the animation frames.
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Just pixelate the spelling, then nobody can tell.
Pixilation surgery is big (Score:1)
They are gonna be surprised on their honeymoon night. It's Laura Croft Syndrome [9gag.com]: she had to match her 90's game graphics or else nobody would date her.
Re: Color me surprised (Score:3)
guide to Japanese culture (Score:2)
Genitals: bad Tentacles: oh, wow, how did THAT get THERE?
Disappointing (Score:1)
"Cyber patrol" eh? (Score:3)
He was caught when police conducted a "cyber patrol,"
This reads likes the cops were browsing porn down at the station and tried to style it out as an official investigation into lewd content online.
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Why do I get this vision of Judge Dredd smashing down the door, pistol whipping the guy and dragging him through thirty feet of broken glass and steel shavings?
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A surprise (Score:3)
I am surprised that they have someone enforcing this kind of laws.
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It's because he was surely annoying someone.
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Police actually enforce laws in some countries rather than just going around and harassing minorities. I mean what else are the Japanese police going to do? They have the 8th lowest crime rate in the world. 7th if you discount countries with populations under 100k.
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This combined with the Japanese general xenophobia is also why they're infamous among the expat community for harassing foreigners. Doing things like enforcing things like enforcing no smoking signs they simply don't bother enforcing with locals and spending their time checking the foreign residency permit of any foreign-looking person they run into. You constantly hear stori
not charged with violating the privacy (Score:2)
Really pisses me off that people think deepfakes should be a crime.
It's in the fucking name deep FAKE.
Stop trying to gimp this promising technology with bullshit luddite crybaby laws calling it "revenge porn" or whatever. It's no different to someone drawing a picture of you doing the dirty, other than the fact that it's done by a computer.
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OMG (Score:5, Funny)
Copyright violation will be the reason the next Al Capone will be caught.
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We need details (Score:5, Funny)
So, how did he do this exactly? What software did he use? My interest is purely academic, of course.
Buzzwords (Score:1)
Re: Buzzwords (Score:2)
If I understand correctly they're invented genitals, not someone else's.
Re: Buzzwords (Score:4, Interesting)
If I understand correctly they're invented genitals, not someone else's.
It is probably an average of the training data, averaged again with what is not blurred in the original. If it works well, it will look realistic, but it will indeed be nobodies equipment that is on display. Next step is to do this full body from simplified body models. "Porn actor/actress" may become something were you do motion-capturing and no nudity or actual sex involved.
Thats what you get (Score:2)
For dropping an atomic bomb on somebody.
Your porn is blurred forever.
Japan .... (Score:2)
The country that will let people make videos of a girl putting an eel in her butt, but draws the line at showing a vagina. Strange place.
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No law? (Score:2)
"At the moment, there's no law criminalizing the use of AI to make such images."
It seems to me like there are at least 2 such laws already.
Nakamoto pleaded guilty to charges of copyright violation and displaying obscene images [...]
This face doesn't exist (Score:1)