'Billie Eilish porn' viewed by millions after being promoted on TikTok

'Deepfake porn' of singer Billie Eilish was promoted on people's TikTok For You Pages and was viewed 11 million times before it was eventually deleted by the platform.

As reported by Vice, a fake sexualised photograph of the 21-year-old singer was pushed by TikTok's algorithm for around four days before the app removed it for violating their guidelines about sexual harassment.

The images were reportedly created by an Artificial Intelligence system that superimposed Elish's head onto a body that wasn't hers. In recent weeks apps such as Midjourney and Lensa have gone viral with many people creating their own AI images, including avatars of themselves.

However, concerns about these apps have already been expressed by women due to their propensity to sexualise the women in the photos. Last week, actor Megan Fox expressed her horror as many of the images that Lensa created for her showed her in a state of undress or completely naked.

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The TikTok account which posted the images had a reported 76,000 followers on the app and more than 2000 followers on Instagram and were said to be offering to make more explicit content for the charge of $20.

Although the images were clearly fake this instance once again highlights the dangers of deepfake technology.

Speaking to Vice, Hera Hussain, the CEO and founder of the gender-based violence charity Chayn said: "The TikTok algorithm isn't set up to discern between what kind of content is getting engagement and this is a critical issue.

“It should not recommend these videos to the feeds of their users. It's not a harmless meme. It's not a still from the singer's own videos. It's a hyper-sexualised AI-manipulated image."

A spokesperson for TikTok has since said in a statement: "This content violates our Community Guidelines, which clearly states that we do not allow content which alters or morphs an image of another individual to portray or imply sexual suggestiveness."

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