People on HN have a hard time understanding that the barrier to entry matters. Photoshop has existed for decades but the level of skill needed to make realistic looking nudes in Photoshop is not something your average freak with a fetish possesses. New technology puts that power into the hands of every single person.
It's not your average freak with a fetish that is even the primary issue. The volume will come from average anybody (although mostly men). That's the real problem. Random co-workers in the office that want to deepfake their crush. Your average teenage boy with a decent GPU that wants to deepfake their classmates just to experiment. There have already been several instances of this catching the news in Europe for example, so it's obviously going on globally.
Oh but the average guy isn't that perverted? Yes they are. We know this from the vast amount of porn they consume and of what type they consume.
Actually nailing someone for revenge porn or sexual harassment seems like a borderline impossible task for police departments if the person doing it has even a minor degree of anonymity. Enlarging the potential pool of people who can do this and the pool of victims they can target by an order of magnitude by lowering both the skill it took to make convincing fakes before and the time taken to make each fake doesn't seem to me like a good idea.
> New technology puts that power into the hands of every single person.
I think the bar is roughly the same, all things considered. If you're going to photoshop, then it's largely a matter of combining two images with a sufficient amount of masking and blurring to make it appear good enough.
With image generators, you've got a couple different options. The more trivial would be doing img2img on your target, the more complex being making a LORA.
Knowing how tech savvy the average Andy is not, I would say anyone capable of going through the steps to do the AI method could, with some brute-forcing, also manage the Photoshop method. Setting up a local instance of any image generator is beyond the majority of the population, so the closest most can get is paid online GUIs that offer an existing service that they first must become moderately proficient in for good results.
Only real difference is that anyone who can do it is much more capable of scale over time than previously. With enough Comfy nodes, you could probably even automate it given face detection and arbitrary images.
The bar is definitely not the same, editing a photo on PS/other photo editors by making a collage realistic enough to cross the uncanny valley is not simply combining two images and doing some blurring and adjusting, even less if pictures are warped from different perspectives, lenses, etc.
Doing that on an image generator is trivial, there are whole websites with the sole purpose of inputting a seed image to be transformed through a prompt, that's a much lower barrier of entry for someone trying to make a fake nude. And it scales, one can do this in a batch in a few minutes/hours, doing that manually on a photo editor requires a lot more effort and knowledge.
I believe that there are unfortunately premade websites that do this for you already, I believe those were what generated all the news stories from Europe mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
