Fuck AI

To be clear, I agree that the line you quoted is almost assuredly incorrect. If they changed it to "thousands of deepfake apps powered by open source technology" then I'd still be dubious, simply because it seems weird that there would be thousands of unique apps that all do the same thing, but that would at least be plausible. Most likely they misread something like https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-downloadable-deepfake-image-generators.html and thought "model variant" (which in this context, explicitly generally means LoRA) and just jumped too hard on the "everything is an open source app" bandwagon.

I did some research - browsing https://github.com/topics/deepfakes (which has 153 total repos listed, many of which are focused on deepfake detection), searching DDG, clicking through to related apps from Github repos, etc..

In terms of actual open source deepfake apps, let's assume that "app" means, at minimum, a piece of software you can run locally, assuming you have access to arbitrary consumer-targeted hardware - generally at least an Nvidia desktop GPU - and including it regardless of whether you have to write custom code to use it (so long as the code is included), use the CLI, hit an API, use a GUI app, a web browser, or a phone app. Considering only apps that have as a primary use case, the capability to create deepfakes by face swapping videos, there are nonetheless several:

• Roop
• Roop Unleashed
• Rope
• Rope Live
• VisoMaster
• DeepFaceLab
• DeepFaceLive
• Reactor UI
• inswapper
• REFace
• Refacer
• Faceswap
• deepfakes_faceswap
• SimSwap

If you included forks of all those repos, then you'd definitely get into the thousands.

If you count video generation applications that can imitate people using, at minimum, Img2Img and 1 Lora OR 2 Loras, then these would be included as well:

• Wan2GP
• HunyuanVideoGP
• FramePack Studio
• FramePack eichi

And if you count the tools that integrate those, then these probably all count:

• ComfyUI
• Invoke AI
• SwarmUI
• SDNext
• Automatic1111 SD WebUI
• Fooocus
• SD WebUI Forge
• MetaStable
• EasyDiffusion
• StabilityMatrix
• MochiDiffusion

If the potential criminals use easier ready-made (commercial) web-services instead of buying a RTX 5090, learning ComfyUI, dealing with the steep learning curve etc, we’d know we have to primarily fight those apps and services, not necessarily the generative AI tools.

This is the part where, to be able to answer that, someone would need to go and actually test out the deepfake apps and compare their outputs. I know that they get used for deepfakes because I've seen the outputs, but as far as I know, every single major platform - e.g., Kling, Veo, Runway, Sora - has safeguards in place to prevent nudity and sexual content. I'd be very surprised if they were being used en masse for this.

In terms of the SaaS apps used by people seeking to create nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes... my guess is those are actually not really part of the figure that's being referenced in this article. It really seems like they're talking about doing video gen with LoRAs rather than doing face swaps.