How Deepfakes Affect Relationships

By: Dr. Denise Renye

We are in the early stages of the AI era and there is still much to learn about how this tool can help as well as hinder humanity. As a Bay Area sex therapist, I’m primarily interested in how AI affects relationships and so far, the results are mixed.

A woman looks shocked while covering her mouth with her hand as she gazes at her cell phone, reflecting surprise or disbelief at potentially a deep fake.

In a previous post, I wrote about how the internet can support relationships by fostering closeness, community, and belonging. However, it can also do the opposite. My younger Bay Area sex therapy clients have been coming to me recently with concerns about deepfake content, which is the manipulation of audio, video, or images using artificial intelligence and deep-learning techniques to create convincing, yet entirely fabricated, content.

There are deepfake videos of all sorts of things but one that concerns me greatly is deepfake pornography, sometimes called revenge porn. Anyone with the desire and a VPN can scrape social media for photos, superimpose those stolen faces on other women’s bodies in pornography, disseminate the imagery over the internet, and make money off it. As unbelievable as it may seem, right now, no federal statutes and few state laws exist to protect deepfakes’ victims.

The documentary Another Body addresses this problem, detailing Taylor Klein’s journey immersing herself in the anonymous image board website 4chan’s cyber-sewer as she works to uncover the person responsible for making and spreading deepfakes using her image. Klein is only one of many women to whom this sort of thing has happened. In January, deepfake pornography circulated about Taylor Swift on the social media platform X, which further brought the issue into the public’s consciousness. While covering the topic, the Guardian reported a truly frightening statistic from 2019 finding 96% of online deepfake video content was nonconsensual pornography. 

Consent is the crucial element in this discussion. None of these women and girls (because deepfake pornography is also being created about young girls) said “yes” to having their faces splashed across the internet engaging in sexual acts. In an era where privacy is increasingly compromised, the ability to obtain someone's image or voice without their knowledge and then manipulate it for malicious purposes poses a serious threat. These women, because it’s almost exclusively women, are victimized by the unauthorized use of their likeness, leading to emotional distress and strain on their relationships.

The emotional distress comes from a sense of violation that someone would do such a thing and the added strain of constantly defending themselves. They must repeatedly say, “No, that’s not me or my body,” while also dealing with the discomfort of knowing some people will think otherwise.  

The negative impact of deepfakes on relationships is not limited to romantic partnerships. Friendships, familial bonds, and professional connections can all be strained by the dissemination of fabricated content because again, it’s not always clear the content is a deepfake. Families, friends, and colleagues may come across the pornography and then start treating the person differently. While Taylor Swift could set the record straight with one tweet, not everyone is so lucky. Most people don’t have that sort of reach.

We are still in the Wild West era of deepfake technology but there are things we can do about it right now to address the problem. To address the challenges posed by deepfakes and their impact on relationships, it is important to prioritize awareness, education, and the development of countermeasures. As a Bay Area sex therapist, I tell my clients to be vigilant about the content they encounter online, remembering how easy it is for content to be manipulated. In other words, don’t believe everything you see. I also promote a culture of digital literacy that emphasizes critical thinking and verification.

Lastly, policymakers and technology companies must work collaboratively to establish robust frameworks that protect individuals from the unauthorized use of their likeness and ensure that consent is a foundational principle in the digital landscape. As we’re already seeing, deepfake technology introduces new challenges to maintaining healthy relationships in the digital age and something must be done because the potential for manipulation without consent raises ethical concerns and jeopardizes the trust upon which relationships are built.

By fostering awareness, promoting digital literacy, and implementing protective measures, society can strive to mitigate the negative impact of deepfakes on relationships and uphold the importance of consent in the evolving landscape of online interactions.

If you’re looking for a Bay Area sex therapist and want to work together for sex therapy, click here. I also offer depth psychotherapy and holistic coaching. 

Reference

Saner, Emine. “Inside the Taylor Swift deepfake scandal: ‘It’s men telling a powerful woman to get back in her box’” The Guardian. January 31, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/31/inside-the-taylor-swift-deepfake-scandal-its-men-telling-a-powerful-woman-to-get-back-in-her-box