Pervs using UNDERAGE Emma Watson pics for fake celeb sex tapes
Several images of the Potter star's face taken when she was as young as 10 have turned up on a porn forum that helps people make fake smut films
CHILDHOOD photos of actress Emma Watson are being used by pervs on a porn forum dedicated to creating fake celebrity sex videos, The Sun has learned.
The actress, who may be as young as 10 in one photo, has been consistently targeted by users of the "deepfakes" app, which uses AI to let anyone make their own phoney smut clips.
Law professor Andrew Murray told The Sun that creating these videos using underage photos of Emma Watson is an "offence under the Protection of Children Act", and that doing so lead to jail time.
To create the videos, users first track down an XXX clip featuring a porn star that looks like an actress.
They then feed an app with hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of photos of the victim's face, and a machine learning algorithm swaps out the faces frame-by-frame until it spits out a realistic, but fake, sex tape.
Users have been sharing these fake porn videos, possible illegally, on the Reddit internet forum, although some hosting services have been trying to squash the dodgy material.
To help other users create these videos, pervs are uploading "facesets", which are huge computer folders filled with a celebrity's face that can be easily fed through the "deepfakes" app.
A folder filled with photos of Harry Potter film star Emma Watson contained several images where the actress is clearly underage.
One image of Emma's face had been pulled from the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone movie, in a scene where her character Hermione was meeting Harry and Ron for the first time on the Hogwarts Express.
The movie was filmed between September 2000 and July 2001, which means Emma – who was born in April 1990 – would've been just 10 or 11 years old at the time.
We spoke to Andrew Murray, a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, who specialises in technology and media law.
Murray said that creating videos using these underage pics for the creation of porn is "almost certainly" illegal.
He explains that the Protection of Children Act 1978 prohibits the production of an indecent image of a child, including "by superimposing the child's face onto images of an adult".
He saws that the law covers "pseudo-photographs", which include images made using computer software that look like genuine photographs.
"If the image appears to portray a child in an indecent way then this is covered by the Act," he tells us.
According to Murray, the creation of these videos carries a maximum jail sentence of 10 years, while possession is punishable by up to five years in jail in the UK.
However, he says that people supplying the underage photos of childhood stars like Emma Watson probably aren't committing a criminal offence, but are likely committing "civil wrongs, copyright infringement for one".
"Authorities may want to attempt to charge those who supply the original images with some form of incitement offence," he added.
One Reddit user commenting on a link to Emma Watson's "faceset" wrote: "If some of these images were used to train the model's face, would or wouldn't it be considered kiddie porn? I'm gonna say 'yes'".
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Another said: "Yeah, it's pretty f***ed up to put pictures of celebs when they are underage."
But despite some minor backlash forum users have "upvoted" – or liked – the Watson "faceset" more than 70 times.
We've asked Reddit for comment and will update this article with any response.