“What do you expect? You’re part of the internet”: Analyzing Western Celebrities’ Experiences as Usees of Deepfake Technology

Deepfake technology is often used to create non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery (NSII), mainly of celebrity women. Through Critical Discursive Psychological analysis, we ask; i) how celebrities construct being targeted by deepfakes and ii) how they navigate infrastructural and social obstacles when seeking recourse. In this paper, we adopt Baumer’s concept of “Usees” (stakeholders who are non-consenting, unaware and directly targeted by technology), to understand public statements made by eight celebrity women and one non-binary individual targeted with NSII. Celebrities describe harms of being non-consensually targeted by deepfakes and they describe various infrastructural/social factors) which hinder activism and recourse. This work has implications in recognizing the roles of infrastructures underlying deepfake abuse and the potential of human-computer interaction to improve existing recourses for NSII. We also contribute to understanding false victim-blaming rhetoric about deepfake abuse. Future work should involve interventions which challenge values and false beliefs which motivate NSII creation/dissemination.