Reddit Bans AI-Powered Porn, Classifying It As ‘Involuntary Pornography’

Reddit has always been a strange community where users of every age, gender, and point of view could find other like-minded individuals to indulge in their interests. This applies to porn, as well, with numerous sub-Reddits being dedicated to one form or another. The platform typically has no problem with most of them but it recently banned r/deepfakes, which features porn made using artificial intelligence.

The whole premise to the section is that it would create porn scenes using faces or assets of other people such as celebrities in order to produce a particular fantasy. While seemingly innocuous to those who frequented domain, Reddit took issue with it and laid down the ban hammer. In a blog post, the site explained that r/deepfakes was in violation of its updated rules, which includes the part about posting material without the consent of its subjects.

The thinking behind the decision is based on the fact that creating the likeness of celebrities to act out sexual fantasies required their explicit permission. Sex scenes in movies, for example, are fine.

It would seem that Reddit has been in a bit of a banning rampage recently as well, hitting multiple sub-Reddits for similar violations, The Verge reports. These include r/YouTubefakes and r/CelebFakes.

Oddly enough, other sub-Reddits were spared of getting banned even though they also feature supplanting images and people in video materials with the faces of celebrities. The platform did say that it relied on first-party reports to identify and sentence the offending sections, so there’s no telling how far this would go.

AI-powered pornography gained steam on the platform after reports started circulating last year of the new technology. Prior to its existence, viewers have had to rely on actors portraying fictional characters in movies or parodies of real-life figures to try and create their fantasy scenarios.