Nina Schick, the author of the new book “DEEPFAKES,” writes about the disturbing AI phenomenon deepfakes, and how it will wreak havoc on our civil liberties in the years to come.

A dangerous new threat to civil liberties is brewing online—and it starts in porn.

To be more precise, it starts in a new type of non-consensual fake porn of women. It is “new” in the sense that it is generated or manipulated by AI. These creations are a cut above a Photoshopped image of a woman’s face stuck onto a porn star’s body. Thanks to recent advances in deep learning, AI can now be trained to generate (wo)men in scenes that they never inhabited. It can reimagine them as living, breathing…and fucking. This type of AI-powered porn is better known by its colloquial name: deepfakes.

In its earliest incarnation, deepfakes emerged on Reddit at the end of 2017. An anonymous Redditor figured out to harness open-source tools emerging from the AI research community to make fake porn. His creations were an immediate hit. When he revealed how he made them, he caused a frenzy on Reddit. Copycat imitators immediately started making their own deepfake porn. Reddit quickly tried to shut it down, but it was too late: the nuclear code had been released.

Less than three years on, and deepfake porn has spawned its own unique internet ecosystem. It is also still an exclusively gendered phenomenon. Sites featuring deepfake porn of every (female) celebrity imaginable—from Emma Watson to Ann Coulter—are easily accessible with a few clicks on Google.