“No moving on” from explicit deepfakes, says Sweet Anita

Streamer comments on Atrioc drama
“No moving on” from explicit deepfakes, says Sweet Anita
“No moving on” from explicit deepfakes, says Sweet Anita /

It’s been a bit over two weeks since a deepfake porn video scandal grasped Twitch. While the public eye has mostly moved on, focusing on Hogwarts Legacy drama, there is “no moving on” for some of the victims, as Sweet Anita stated in a recent interview with ITV News.

It all started when a clip from Twitch streamer Atrioc went viral, showing an opened browser tab of an adult video website. While that alone would not be a huge deal, the opened videos featured deepfake versions of female streamers such as Pokimane, QTCinderella, and Sweet Anita.

Atrioc, who said he got “morbidly curious” and apologized for his actions, has since stepped back from streaming and stated that he wants to focus on helping the victims and taking down similar sites from the internet. One of the affected streamers, QTCinderella, has taken legal action against the site visible on the clip from Atrioc’s stream and vowed to “fucking sue” the person behind it all.

While QTCinderella said that her friendship with Atrioc has been irreparably broken through this incident, Sweet Anita stated that she bears him no ill will: “None of the anger, none of the wanting to do anything about this is directed towards him.”

Instead, she wants everyone consuming such content to understand the impact of what’s happened – and is still happening on a regular basis – on those affected: “It’s literally about wanting people who make this kind of content to A: not profit from it, and B: be genuinely terrified to do it.”

From her perspective, “there isn’t any moving on from it. This is just out there, forever now. This is just an extra aspect that I will have to deal with.” She’s also skeptical about the effect of legal measures, saying: “Frankly, you can change the law, but the law won’t change anything until the culture does. Right now, resoundingly, we’re seeing that a lot of people don’t know what ‘consent’ means. And a lot of people feel entitled to anyone’s body on the internet.”

Significant regulation of deepfake usage is under way in the UK, where the use of one’s image for deepfakes without consent and permission will be punishable by law. The US has no such legal tools available to victims right now, making it very difficult to punish the creators of this sort of content. Porn, alongside political misinformation, is considered one of the most unethical and dangerous areas for which deepfake technology is used today.


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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg