People Are Having Sex With 3D Avatars of Their Exes and Celebrities

samleecole writes: Using a photograph to algorithmically generate a person's face and some 3D-rendered body parts, anyone can make a realistic avatar of someone who is walking around in real life. Import the avatar into another program, and you can have sex with them in virtual reality, without the real person ever giving consent. On forums like Reddit, marketplaces like Patreon, and on standalone websites, communities of anonymous users are making and selling computer-generated likenesses of celebrities and other real people. The 3D models that emerge from these communities can be articulated into any position, animated, modified, interacted with in real time, and manipulated in ways that defy the constraints of physical reality.

Like deepfake videos traded online, the technology to create photorealistic 3D models of real people is rapidly approaching -- and it's getting easier for the average user to access those tools and programs. Rendering a realistic human is a process which historically required the specialized technical knowledge of teams of artists in game and special effects studios. Those studios, traditionally, have to obtain the rights to use someone's likeness before rendering them, but many hobbyists seemingly make avatars of anyone, with or without their consent.