DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it’s stripped from web
A machine-learning-powered perv super-tool that automagically removed clothes from women in photos to make them appear naked has been torn offline by its makers.
The shamefaced creators of the $50 Windows and Linux desktop app DeepNude claimed they were overwhelmed by demand from internet creeps: the developers' servers apparently buckled under a stampede of downloads, their buggy software generated more crash reports than they could deal with, and this all came amid a firestorm of social media outrage.
Basement dwellers and trolls could feed it snaps of celebrities, colleagues, ex-girlfriends, and anyone else who takes their fancy, and have the software guess, somewhat badly, what they look like underneath their clothes, keeping their faces intact. These bogus nudes are perfect for distributing around the ‘net to humiliate victims.
Hi! DeepNude is offline. Why? Because we did not expect these visits and our servers need reinforcement. We are a small team. We need to fix some bugs and catch our breath. We are working to make DeepNude stable and working. We will be back online soon in a few days. — deepnudeapp (@deepnudeapp) June 27, 2019
“The world is not yet ready for DeepNude,” the team, based in Estonia, said on Thursday. Or rather, quite likely, the team wasn’t ready for all the criticism and rage lobbed its way on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, as a result of its work.
The gang also tried to pass off the whole thing as a joke, and just a silly app for friends that wasn’t supposed to go viral, though that argument is at odds with the $50 price tag. Here’s the announcement of the sudden end of DeepNude:
You might not be able to download DeepNude anymore, but it can still be used
The DeepNude website and app went viral after it was first reported by Vice’s Samantha Cole earlier this week. There’s nothing to see on the dot-com right now, though. Below is a screenshot we managed to grab before it all disappeared. “DeepNude is an offline automated software that transforms photos, creating fake nude,” the webpage originally boasted.
The AI-based app was built for Windows 10 and Linux, and could utilize GPUs as well as CPU cores to generate its fake nude images of women from submitted clothed pictures. There was a free version and a premium $50 version available download. Both neural networks slapped a watermark in the corner of their output images to show that the snaps were fake, and how they were created. It could easily be removed by image editing tools such as Photoshop or GIMP. The premium version created images that have a less obvious watermark than the free version.
The site apparently struggled to process credit card payments under the strain of demand. Paying in cryptocurrencies worked for a little while longer, however, until that system collapsed, too.
Now that the project has been scrapped completely, the DeepNude app can no longer be downloaded. Any netizens who paid for the premium version but have yet to activate it will not be given access to it, and will be refunded.
However, it’s all too late: the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. It is only a matter of time before someone makes and distributes a clone of the software. ®
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