Major deepfake porn site shuts down

The notorious AI-generated pornography site, MrDeepFakes, has shut down, after losing a key service provider, according to a message posted to its webpage.

“A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation,” a notice on the site’s homepage read on Monday.

“We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use,” the page said, adding that the message would be removed in about a week.

The website was popular for allowing users to upload nonconsensual, digitally altered, explicit sexual content — particularly of celebrities, though there were several instances of nonpublic figures’ likenesses being abused as well.

The motivations behind these deepfake videos included sexual gratification, as well as the degradation and humiliation of its targets, according to a 2024 study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego.

“As of November 2023, MrDeepFakes hosted 43K sexual deepfake videos depicting 3.8K individuals; these videos have been watched more than 1.5B times,” the research paper says.

Of those videos, 95.3% of the targets are celebrity women. The research also showed that despite purportedly banning such content, there were hundreds of documented instances of private individuals being targets and more than 1,000 videos with violent scenes depicting rape and abuse.

Federal regulators and other institutions have grappled with how to tamp down on this new frontier of disinformation.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in support of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which stands for: Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks.

The act would establish strict penalties and fines for those who publish “intimate visual depictions” of people, both real and computer-generated, of adults or minors, without their consent or with harmful intent. It also would require websites that host such videos to establish a process for victims to have that content scrubbed n a timely manner.

The bill passed the Senate earlier this year and has been sent to President Trump for his signature.