DeepNude, app that made women appear nude, shuts down
What's the story
A little over 24 hours ago, a creepy app called 'DeepNude' started gaining widespread attention. The program employed artificial intelligence to remove clothes from the images of women, thereby making them appear nude. The capability raised immediate alarm all over the globe, prompting its creators to end the development and distribution of the whole thing. Here are the details.
Working
DeepNude AI manipulated women images instantly
While people have long had the ability to manipulate photographs, DeepNude made this process as instant as uploading an image and applying a filter. The program leveraged advanced machine learning to achieve this manipulation and worked only on the images of women. It was supposedly created by a developer from Estonia and had been available for download on Windows, Linux for quite some time.
Working
Some manipulated images looked surprisingly real
The team behind the DeepNude network trained the AI on some 10,000 images of undressed women. It manipulated photos with varying degrees of success, but in some cases, the results looked surprisingly real. To note, the app had a free and paid version; the free one placed a large watermark across the image while the paid one placed a "FAKE" stamp on the corner.
Virality
Program went viral in a matter of hours
When Vice News brought DeepNude into the light, it went absolutely viral. Many people started raising concerns over the potential misuse of the program where anyone could manipulate the photo of a woman and harass her directly. In other cases, a number of people started looking up for DeepNude to download and have the app on their machine.
Shut down
Now, it's being shuttered
Thanks to widespread outcry and concerns, the creators of DeepNude decided to pull the plug on the software. First, the website designed for the program went down, and then, its creators issued a statement confirming that the program is being shuttered. They said they greatly underestimated the interest in the project and the probability of its misuse is way too high.
Twitter Post
Here's the full statement from DeepNude's creators
— deepnudeapp (@deepnudeapp) June 27, 2019
Warning
Don't try downloading DeepNude from the internet
Now that the program has been shuttered, not downloading it is highly advised. There has been a spike in search interest for DeepNude app and a number of fake sites claiming to offer the program have come up on the internet. However, instead of the program, they are serving dangerous malware, adware to the visitors.