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

Picture the person who'd make a fake sexual video of someone they know. You probably imagine someone obviously disturbed — a predator with red flags you'd spot a mile away. But researchers who studied this found something that stops you cold. The people most likely to do it have no dark personality traits at all. No narcissism. No psychopathy. Just certain attitudes.

This matters whether or not you've ever heard the

This matters whether or not you've ever heard the word "deepfake" before. A deepfake is a fake image or video made by A.I. — realistic enough to look like a real person did something they never did. And the targets aren't just famous people. They're classmates. Coworkers. Neighbors. If that scares you, it should. But the research here actually gives us something powerful — a way to see the danger coming. So why does it come from attitudes instead of personality?

Let's start with the scale, because it's staggering. According to researchers at Edith Cowan University in Australia, deepfake pornography jumped more than four hundred sixty percent between 01/01/2022 and the end of twenty twenty-three. Nearly five times the volume in a single year. And ninety-nine percent of those videos targeted women. That's not a few troubled individuals. That's a pattern.

So the team ran a study to figure out who's behind it. They surveyed two hundred thirteen heterosexual men. They measured two separate things — the men's personality traits, and their attitudes about harm and abuse. Then they asked how willing each man was to create deepfake pornography in made-up scenarios. The clever part? They kept personality and attitude completely separate. That let them see which one actually predicted the behavior.

The personality traits predicted nothing

And the personality traits predicted nothing. Narcissism, the dark stuff we're trained to fear — no connection. What predicted willingness was attitude. Specifically, men who minimize or excuse harmful behavior were far more likely to say they'd do it. Beliefs that treat abuse as no big deal. That was the warning sign.

Now, why do we get this so wrong? Because spotting "bad people" feels safe. It's comforting to believe harm comes from obviously broken individuals — people who aren't us, aren't anyone we know. The truth is harder. Ordinary people with ordinary-seeming attitudes create this abuse at scale.

The study found one more mechanism that explains how. The men were much more willing to make fake videos of celebrities than of people they personally knew. The further away the target felt, the less harm they imagined doing. Social distance flips a switch — it grants permission.