A look at the creation of a new kind of nonconsensual porn, which combines deepfakes with 3D avatars that can be manipulated to do whatever their creators want
A lineup of female celebrities stand in front of you. Their faces move, smile, and blink as you move around them. Tweets: @mathewi and @zenalbatross Tweets: Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : This is fascinating and disturbing at the same time — how long until all porn is created this way? And would that be better or worse than what we have now? https://www.vice.com/... via @vice @zenalbatross : men who make this shit shouldn't be allowed to write another line of code for the rest of their life https://www.vice.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2019, VICE documented a new format for nonconsensual pornography: celebrity faces grafted onto fully manipulable 3D avatar bodies, letting creators pose and animate their targets however they choose. Mathew Ingram's reaction at the time captured the open question — whether all porn might eventually be made this way.
The years since answered him: by mid-2020, deepfake porn was rampant on mainstream tube sites with individual videos of popular actresses drawing millions of views, and the pipeline only got easier — from abuse footage persisting inside machine-learning training sets to model-sharing hubs like CivitAI and today's one-click nudify apps.
First-order effects
- Female celebrities whose likenesses are cloned into these avatars face a form of impersonation that goes beyond swapped faces in existing videos — their bodies can be puppeted in any scenario, and there is no original footage to get removed.
Second-order effects
- Porn platforms become the enforcement bottleneck: as deepfake porn proliferated across major sites, takedown requests replaced prevention, while the underlying models and datasets keep regenerating the content elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- Victims' remedies have not kept pace — as the 2025 coverage of nudify tools shows, legal options remain limited — pushing the burden toward likeness governance frameworks rather than case-by-case takedowns, especially where porn's stigma leaves performers with weak IP protection over their own image.
The trend: Nonconsensual sexual imagery is moving from bespoke fakes to industrial-scale generation, with each tooling wave — datasets, model hubs, nudify apps — lowering the cost faster than law and platform policy adapt.