Anonymous users on Reddit, Patreon, and other websites are making, selling, and getting off to custom 3D likenesses of celebrities and other real people
\u003Cp\u003EYou can buy a belly button online. It can be an innie, outtie, twisted to the left or the right, and placed on a virtual body.
Context & Ripple Effects
This continues a line of reporting that started when AI-assisted tools like FakeApp let users with no technical background churn out convincing face-swap porn videos. A year later the same story returns with a structural twist: instead of pasting a face onto existing footage, anonymous creators are building fully manipulable 3D bodies — belly buttons included — and selling them as commissioned work on mainstream platforms.
The significance is venue, not novelty: the named marketplaces are Reddit and Patreon, general-purpose creator economies rather than fringe boards, which means the trade sits inside platforms whose businesses depend on creator monetization. VICE's follow-up on deepfake-plus-3D-avatar nonconsensual porn weeks later confirms this was not a one-off find.
First-order effects
- Reddit and Patreon are hosting anonymous sellers who take commissions for sexualized 3D likenesses of celebrities and private people, with no consent step for the subjects being modeled.
- Buyers get manipulable virtual bodies rather than fixed video files — pose, anatomy, and placement are parameters — which changes what a purchased likeness can be used for.
Second-order effects
- Reddit's own avatar commerce ambitions — an NFT-based avatar marketplace and the millions of Vault wallets created for it — put official, sanctioned likeness products side by side with the gray market, making the moderation question impossible to defer.
- Patreon, which is simultaneously overhauling recommendations to boost smaller creators, risks its discovery systems amplifying likeness-selling shops that it must then police and deplatform.
Third-order effects
- Following the FakeApp trajectory, where tooling collapsed the skill barrier for video, interactive 3D assets turn nonconsensual synthetic media from files into ongoing services — pushing Reddit and Patreon from reactive takedowns toward proactive detection they don't currently have.
- If the pattern holds, synthetic likenesses of real people harden into a distinct policy category — separate from copyright and from ordinary adult content — that platforms, payment processors, and eventually regulators treat on their own terms.
The trend: Sexualized synthetic media is shifting from pre-rendered deepfake videos to interactive, commissionable 3D likenesses traded inside mainstream creator economies, outrunning those platforms' moderation models.