On Wednesday this week you could have gone to a website called
Deepnude.com and looked under the clothes of a fully dressed woman. On Thursday the site was down. That website used artificial intelligence to give people a glimpse of what others might look like without any clothes. All visitors had to do was upload a photo and then click on the undress button and see what happens.
According to reports, the results were very realistic. That said, the site was criticized for violating a person's privacy, with CNN calling the result "transfixing and nauseating." Nonetheless, such AI-driven voyeurism proved to be very popular - so popular that the site soon became overloaded.
If you go to the website toda,y you see a notice that is proof of how many people want to see a deep fake nude image. "DeepNude is offline," reads the notice on the main page. "Why? Because we did not expect these traffic and our servers need reinforcement. We are a small team. We need to fix some bugs and catch our breath."
According to Motherboard, whose writer played around with the app before it was taken down, it only works on women. When that writer used a photo of a man, it undressed him but produced a woman's genitals. Not surprisingly, this invasion of privacy has not gone down well with a lot of people.
As for how realistic it all is, Motherboard said with low resolution images the app failed completely, but did produce realistic results with better images. Apparently the free version came with a large watermark over the photo, but the $50 version just had an easily removed 'Fake' written in the corner.
