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: @yucipaloosi , @m4riam7 , @mathewi , and @zenalbatross Tweets: @yucipaloosi : Deepfakes allow you to choose a face to map on to an existing porn video. But ‘3D-generated porn gives users total control of the body, allowing them to manipulate it in ways that even defy physical reality’ It gets worse and worse! https://www.vice.com/... Mariam / @m4riam7 : “If there were worldwide ban deepfakes I'll stop making them, but that won't happen, we have more pressing issues on our hand than this because even without fakes/fake news people get manipulated everyday.” ...i'm lost for words https://www.vice.com/... 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
This December 2019 VICE report marks an escalation point in the nonconsensual-porn problem it had been tracking: instead of mapping a celebrity's face onto an existing video, creators now render manipulable 3D avatars wearing those faces, giving users total control of the body. By then deepfake pornography was already rampant on mainstream tube sites, with some videos drawing millions of views.
The piece also captures the enforcement vacuum early — one creator quoted says a hypothetical worldwide ban wouldn't happen anyway. That vacuum only widened: footage later proved able to survive indefinitely inside machine-learning training data, porn's stigma left performers unable to defend their likenesses as IP, and by 2025 the same harm had been productized into one-click 'nudify' apps.
First-order effects
- The female celebrities rendered as these avatars lose control of their image entirely: unlike face-swapped video, there is no source recording whose removal takedown eliminates the abuse, because the body itself is generated.
- Creators operating in the open, like the @m4riam7 account quoted in the report, signal they will ignore any ban short of a global one — putting the burden on platforms rather than makers.
Second-order effects
- Porn-hosting sites inherit a moderation problem with no fingerprint to match: fully synthetic clips defeat the hash-based removal that works against copies of real footage, pushing platforms toward detection methods that barely existed in 2019.
- Because the underlying footage of real people can persist in training corpora even after takedowns — as later reporting showed — each generation of models makes the next wave of fake content easier and cheaper to produce.
Third-order effects
- The pattern running from 3D avatars through shared generative-model sites like CivitAI to today's nudify tools points toward a structural gap in likeness governance: legal remedies for victims remain thin while the cost of fabricating a person approaches zero.
- If synthesis keeps outrunning law, protection shifts from removing content to controlling inputs — consent verification at model-training time and at the point of generation — rather than chasing outputs after publication.
The trend: Nonconsensual sexual imagery is evolving from face-swapped real videos toward fully synthetic, endlessly manipulable bodies, consistently staying ahead of both platform moderation and legal recourse.