DeepNude

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About

DeepNude was a deepfakes application which allowed to alter photos of a person to make them appear nude, designed to work on females. Several days after its June 23rd, 2019, release and rapid climb to popularity, the app was permanently shut down over the concerns of potential misuse, although already downloaded copies of the software were continued to be shared.

History

On June 23rd, 2019, Windows and Linux application DeepNude, developed by an anonymous person known only as Alberto, was made available for download online (website no longer available).^[1]^[2]

deepnudeapp @deepnudeapp DeepNude Desktop is ready. It requires Windows 10 or Linux. It works with both CPU and GPU. Visit our website (deepnude.com) and click on Download button. 1:48 PM 23 Jun 2019

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The software, based on a neural network, automatically edited photographs of people to make them appear fully nude. The app only had support for female naked bodies, although an update or a separate app for male bodies was also planned.^[3]

On June 27th, 2019, Vice Motherboard featured a story on the app, titled "This Horrifying App Undresses a Photo of Any Woman With a Single Click", also talking to the creator of the app.^[3] In the following days, multiple news outlets covered the story, including articles by The Verge,^[4] Vox^[5] and CNET.^[6]

On June 27th, the official website experienced a series of crashes due to high number of visitors.^[7] On the same day, the creator of the DeepNude announced that the service had been permanently shut down due to concerns of potential misuse of the application.^[8]

deepnudeapp @deepnudeapp Hi! DeepNude is offline. Why? Because we did not expect these visits and our servers need reinforcement. We are a small team. We need to fix some bugs and catch our breath. We are working to make DeepNude stable and working. We will be back online soon in a few days. 7:10 AM -27 Jun 2019

Here is the brief history, and the end of DeepNude. We created this project for user's entertainment a few months ago. We thought we were in a controlled manner. Honestly, the app is not that great, it only works with particular photos. We never thought it would become viral and we would not be able to control the traffic. We greatly underestimated the request. selling a few sales every month measures adopted (watermarks) if 500,000 people use it, the Despite the safety probability that people will misuse it is too high. We don't want to make money this way. Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don't want to be the ones who sell it. Downloading the software from other sources or any other means would be against the terms of our website. From now on, DeepNude will not release other versions and does not grant anyone its use. Not even the licenses to activate the Premium version. sharing it by People who have not yet upgraded will receive a refund. The world is not yet ready for DeepNude

On the same day, an unknown Reddit user posted a link for a cracked version of the app.^[9]

GitHub Removal

In early July 2019, GitHub removed submissions of DeepNudes code from the repository. On July 9th, the technology news site Motherboard published an article about the removal, which included a statement from a GitHub spokesperson:

"We do not proactively monitor user-generated content, but we do actively investigate abuse reports. In this case, we disabled the project because we found it to be in violation of our acceptable use policy. We do not condone using GitHub for posting sexually obscene content and prohibit such conduct in our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines."

Features

DeepNude uses a pix2pix open-source algorithm to analyze the input image, identify clothing and remove it, replacing it with a generated image of a naked body. The algorithm was trained on a dataset of over 10,000 nude photos of women.^[3]

The free version of the app had the output images partially obscured with a large watermark, removed in the $50 paid version. Paying additional $50 removed a smaller "FAKE" watermark (examples shown below, left and right).^[10]

Traffic

While the exact number of the app downloads is unknown, on June 27th, 2019, the official DeepNude website experienced a series of crashes due to the high load before being shut down.^[7]^[11]^[12]