Kristen Bell ‘shocked’ to learn her face was used in ‘deepfake’ porn video

Actor said she felt ‘exploited’ by the practice

Actor Kristen Bell has revealed that she felt “exploited” after learning that her face was used in “deepfake” pornography.

The Good Place star told Vox that she only found out she’d fallen victim to the practice, which sees the faces of people’s faces (usually women) non-consensually imposed onto the bodies of pornographic actors, after actor Ashton Kutcher alerted her husband Dax Shepard.

“[Ashton] actually told him, 'Oh, by the way, there are these things calls deepfakes and your wife is one of them,’” Bell explained.

'I was just shocked, because this is my face. [It] belongs to me.”

According to Vox’s report, 96 per cent of all deepfakes online are used in a pornographic context and nearly 100 per cent of those of women. While they are often labelled as being “fake”, they can still be extremely damaging to the people involved.

“You know, we’re having this gigantic conversation about consent and I don’t consent, so that’s why it’s not OK,” Bell said. “Even if it’s labelled as, ‘Oh, this is not actually her’, it’s hard to think about that.

“I wish that the internet were a little bit more responsible and a little bit kinder.”

In 2018, Pornhub and Twitter banned the uploading of celebrity deepfakes to their platforms, while Reddit changed its rules to include “depictions that have been faked” in its banning of nudity and sexually explicit content.