The Guy Making Deepfakes of Her Isn't a Monster — He's Someone You Know

Here's the finding that stopped researchers in their tracks: when scientists studied who was likely to create deepfake pornography — fake explicit videos made by pasting someone's real face onto another body without their consent — they looked for the obvious red flags. Narcissism. Dark personality traits. The psychological profile of someone you'd recognize as dangerous. And they found... nothing. No connection. Zero link between those personality measures and willingness to create this kind of abuse.

What did predict it? Attitudes. Ordinary, learned, changeable beliefs about women, entitlement, and what counts as "just a joke."

The Research That Changes How We Think About This

The study came out of Edith Cowan University in Australia, published in the Journal of Sexual Aggression. Researchers surveyed 213 heterosexual men, asking them about their personality traits, their attitudes toward sexual harm, and — through carefully designed fictional scenarios — their willingness to create deepfake pornographic content.

The design was deliberate. They separated personality measurement from attitude measurement on purpose, so they could see which one actually drove behavior. The answer was clear: personality traits didn't move the needle. Attitudes did.

Specifically, the attitudes that predicted willingness to create this content were ones that minimize or excuse sexual harm — things like believing women exaggerate abuse, that certain victims "brought it on themselves," or that sharing explicit images without consent is "just a laugh." Researchers call this cluster of beliefs "rape myth acceptance" — meaning false beliefs that trivialize or excuse sexual violence. It sounds like academic language, but the underlying ideas are things you've probably heard at a dinner table or in a comment section. This article is part of a series — start with 1 In 3 Teens Now Hit By Fake Ai Nudes Heres What To Do Tonig.

That number — 464% growth in a single year — matters here. Because if deepfake abuse were driven by a fixed, rare personality type, that kind of explosive growth would make no sense. Dangerous personalities don't multiply that fast. Normalized attitudes do. When a behavior becomes easier to do AND easier to excuse, more ordinary people do it. That's exactly what happened.

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The "Social Distance" Effect — Why Celebrities Feel Like Fair Game

One of the study's most revealing findings involves who people were more willing to target. Participants reported significantly greater willingness to create deepfake pornography when the target was a celebrity versus someone they personally knew.

Think about what that tells us. It's not about the harm being different — a fake explicit video destroys someone's life whether they're famous or not. The harm is identical. But the psychological distance between creator and target changes how people feel about doing it.

When you don't know someone personally, it's easier to think of their face as a kind of raw material. Something you found online, something that's "already out there." The celebrity's face becomes almost abstract — a data point, not a person. That mental shift is what researchers call a permission structure: a set of mental conditions that make a harmful act feel acceptable, or at least not-quite-real.

"Attitudes minimizing or excusing harmful behavior significantly predicted willingness to create deepfake pornography, while no links were found between dark personality traits such as narcissism and the likelihood to create such content." — Marns & Hollett (2026), as reported by Phys.org

This also explains part of why 99% of deepfake pornography targets women. That's not a coincidence of who has famous faces. It reflects something systemic: a broader cultural attitude about whose image is available for consumption, whose body is treated as content, and whose discomfort is treated as optional. The pattern is structural, not individual. You can't explain a 99% gender skew with individual psychology. You explain it with shared cultural beliefs.

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Why We Keep Looking for the "Obviously Bad Person"

Here's where most people get this wrong — and honestly, it's an understandable mistake. Previously in this series: Your Face Just Became A Password You Can Never Change.

We're wired to protect ourselves by spotting dangerous individuals. The creepy stranger. The obvious red flag. The person who just feels off. That instinct served humans well for thousands of years, and it's deeply baked in. So when we hear about something as violating as deepfake sexual abuse, our brain immediately reaches for the same toolkit: who is the obviously disturbed person doing this?

The research says: that's not the right question. No links were found between dark personality traits — narcissism, psychopathy, that whole category — and the likelihood to create deepfake pornography. The person doing this doesn't have a sign on their forehead. They might be the guy who laughs a little too hard at certain jokes. The one who says "it's not that serious" when someone complains about harassment. The one who thinks sharing a fake image is "just trolling."

That's the scarier lesson. Not that monsters are hiding among us — but that ordinary people, holding ordinary-seeming attitudes, are committing serious harm and mostly not recognizing it as harm at all. When Edith Cowan University researchers looked at why people self-reported creating image-based sexual abuse, the justifications ranged from "sharing for fun" to chasing social approval — responses that showed almost no awareness that they'd done something harmful. That's not a monster's rationalizing. That's a permission structure doing its job.

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What This Actually Changes — For Parents, Schools, and Anyone Paying Attention

Think of it this way. A harmful personality type is like a reckless driver — someone inherently dangerous behind the wheel. But harmful attitudes are like a road with no speed limit signs, surrounded by other drivers who treat speeding as completely normal. The second scenario doesn't require reckless people. It just requires a culture that removes the guardrails. Remove the social friction that would otherwise make someone stop and think "wait, this is wrong" — and ordinary people do harmful things.

That reframe matters enormously for anyone trying to protect young people. Teaching kids to "spot the dangerous person" is useful, but it's incomplete. Because the research says the dangerous person might look perfectly normal — might even be popular, funny, well-liked. What's less normal, and what we can actually teach people to notice, are the attitudes.

Attitudes that treat women's images as public property. Jokes where the punchline is someone's humiliation. Group chats where sharing explicit content without consent gets social upvotes instead of pushback. Online spaces where "it's just a meme" or "she's famous, she can handle it" functions as a permission slip. Those are the warning signs the research points to — and they're visible, if you know what you're looking at. Up next: Government Login Identity Verification Malta What It Means F.

At CaraComp, we work in facial recognition and identity verification — the exact technology that makes deepfake creation possible at scale. Understanding why people misuse it isn't just academic. It shapes what protections matter most: not just detecting fake images after they're created, but building the kind of awareness that stops the justifications before anyone opens the software.

The peer-reviewed study by Marns & Hollett points toward a hopeful conclusion buried inside a difficult finding. Personality traits are largely fixed — you can't teach someone out of narcissism. But attitudes? Attitudes are learned. Which means they can be unlearned. They can be challenged in a group chat, called out in a classroom, named for what they are at a dinner table.

So here's the question worth sitting with: if the warning sign isn't "this person seems dangerous" but "this person thinks humiliating someone with their image is funny" — what would it look like to actually call that out, the next time you see it? Not after the video exists. Before anyone decides to make it.

The research didn't just identify a problem. It handed us a different place to intervene. That's the aha moment: the prevention work isn't about detecting monsters. It's about making sure the attitudes that create permission structures don't go unchallenged in the ordinary, everyday places where they quietly take root.