“We absolutely understand the concern around deepfakes, so we make it easy for it to be removed,” Hawkins says. Patrini adds that Sensity has increasingly seen deepfakes being made for other people in the public realm, such as Instagram, Twitch and YouTube influencers, and he worries the advancement of deepfake tech will inevitably see members of the public targeted. Deepfake pornography videos are widely considered to target, harm, and humiliate the women that are placed at their center. “The attitude of these websites is that they don't really consider this a problem,” says Giorgio Patrini, CEO and chief scientist at Sensity, which was until recently called DeepTrace. Many of the celebrities have continuously been the targets of deepfakes since they first emerged in 2018.

Other deepfake videos, which have hundreds of thousands or millions of views, include celebrities such as Natalie Portman, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, and Indian actress Anushka Shetty. One 30-second video, which appears on all three of the above sites and uses actress Emma Watson’s face, has been viewed more than 23 million times-being watched 13 million times on Xnxx.