On Monday, Twitch streamer Brandon Ewing, who goes by Atrioc online, admitted to buying and watching deepfakes from an account that makes non-consensual, sexually explicit AI-generated videos of his colleagues in the streaming world.
In a live stream on Monday, Ewing inadvertently showed browser windows open to a website that hosts non-consensual, AI-generated images. The window showed that he was viewing images on the account of someone who specialized in making deepfakes of popular streamers. Viewers of the stream caught the leak and screenshotted the site, then shared the site, images from it, and names of the women who were deepfaked.
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As first reported by Dextero, Ewing said during his Monday stream, in a tearful, now-viral apology, that he clicked an ad for deepfake porn while browsing Pornhub. That ad took him to another subscriber-only website, he said, where he paid to view the images of popular female streamers. He said he was driven by “morbid curiosity” and that his watching non-consensual porn is not a “pattern of behavior.” His wife, cosplayer Arianna Ewing, sat in the background of the stream and cried.
At the time of writing, the deepfake creator’s page on the site Ewing used has been scrubbed of deepfakes and now hosts a long apology to streamers that describes the non-consensual fake sex tapes as “immoral.”
“To be quite honest if I wanted to continue this, what I got was the best advertisement I could ever ask for but after seeing the situation of that couple apologizing and a few streamers’ reactions who thought [I] ‘did not care’, I feel like the total piece of shit I am,” they wrote. “The best course of action I have understood is to just wipe my part off the internet and help decrease the number of future videos of those involved. You will not see me pop up again.”
Ewing claimed in the apology stream’s chat that he wasn’t watching videos of anyone he knows, according to screenshots. But his actions, carelessness on stream, and public apology have brought more unwanted attention to the streamers seen in the leaked screenshots. Many observers described his tearful apology and the entire situation as strange and absurd, with some even wondering what the big deal was in the first place. The incident reflects an issue at the root of deepfakes’ invention: non-consensual porn of real people, mainly women.
Deepfakes—images generated by machine learning algorithms to swap one person’s face onto another person’s body—are primarily used to make non-consensual, fake sex tapes that target and harass women. Since their inception in 2018, deepfakes have been used as a way to control women’s bodies online. Targets of non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes report that these videos have real, devastating effects on their mental wellbeing and their ability to exist online, and when it happens to online personalities like streamers and cosplayers, logging off and abandoning their livelihoods isn’t often a reasonable option. Female streamers already contend with sexism, objectification, and disrespect as part of being online; cosplayers similarly report rampant deepfake harassment that makes existing online difficult and traumatizing.
Ewing knows several of the women who are allegedly targeted by the deepfakes creator, like streamer QTCinderella, personally. Some of those women have spoken out about how Ewing’s actions and admission affects them. In a live stream on Jan. 30, QTCinderella said that although confidantes might tell her not to go live, she wanted people to see the toll this situation has taken on her. “This is what it looks like to feel violated, this is what it looks like to feel taken advantage of. This is what it looks like to see yourself naked against your will being spread all over the internet,” she said.
“Fuck Atrioc for showing it to thousands of people. Fuck the people DM’ing me pictures of myself from my website. Fuck you all. This is what it looks like, this is what the pain looks like,” she said. “It should not be part of my job to have to pay money to get this stuff taken down. It should not be part of my job to be harassed, to see pictures of me ‘nude’ spread around.”
She went on to address the person who made the website selling the deepfakes, vowing to sue them. “I promise you. With every part of my soul, I’m going to fucking sue you,” she said. “That’s all I have to say.”
Most states in the U.S. have laws against non-consensual sexual material, but only California, Virginia, and Texas specifically name deepfakes. Even with laws in place that penalize people who make and spread malicious deepfakes, getting recourse as a victim can be extremely difficult.
Another streamer who is listed in the screenshots, Sweet Anita, tweeted that news coverage of Ewing’s apology is how she found out that deepfake videos of her are out there. “I literally choose to pass up millions by not going into sex work and some random cheeto encrusted porn addict solicits my body without my consent instead,” she wrote. “Don’t know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point.”
Adept, another popular streamer, spoke out about the situation on Monday: “Unfortunately we find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place of letting these images and the people who make/consume them occupy our thoughts or to relinquish any feelings of shame and embarrassment by remembering this is someone else’s perversion at no fault of our own,” she wrote.
Ewing, QTCinderella, Sweet Anita, and Adept did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Jordan Pearson contributed reporting to this story.
