If your friend ever beckons you, with toothy grin and piggy eyes, turning his laptop towards you with a most grotesque yet enigmatic image—a video of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez performing a sexual act—do not look my boy! Grab the nearest cucumber and smash it over your friend’s head, then submerge his laptop in some holy water.

What your friend was attempting to show you, before you averted your righteous gaze, was an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deepfake. Deepfake videos use artificial intelligence to transplant someone’s face onto someone else’s body—the “deep” deriving from deep machine learning, the “fake” from deception. In just a few short years, deepfake videos have become nearly indistinguishable from reality. Like this recent series of Tom Cruise deepfakes that went viral for their perfect replication of the actor’s voice and face.

Many worry about the political possibilities of deepfakes. Imagine Pete Buttigieg deepfaked into muttering the N-word or Kamala Harris smoking crack. Congressman Adam Schiff recently wrote a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coates, saying that deepfakes “pose a threat to United States public discourse and national security, with broad and concerning implications for offensive active measures campaigns targeting the United States.” Yet a deepfake hasn’t had any impact in a political election—yet. Instead, Sensity AI, a deepfake research firm, has found that between 90-95% of all online deepfakes are porn. Which is surprising, and yet not surprising at all.

Deepfake pornography was first injected into the public discourse by a 2017 Motherboard article written by Samantha Cole: “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked.” Cole corresponded with a Reddit user named “deepfakes” (the first coinage of the term) who had used machine learning algorithms to insert actress Gal Gadot’s face into a pornographic step-sibling video. He fed hundreds of images of Gadot to his software, presumably cackling as his horrific chimera crackled to life and moaned in ecstasy.

The Gal Gadot deepfake was easy to make because as a celebrity, endless images of her existed. Yet the author of the Motherboard article drew the appropriate conclusion: in the age of social media, most of us have already uploaded hundreds of pictures of ourselves online. Ergo anyone with an Instagram can be deepfaked into sucking dick.

Within a year of the Motherboard article, sites like Reddit and Pornhub and Twitter—which also hosted or linked guides on how to create deepfakes at home—banned deepfake porn, considering it a form of nonconsensual sexual content in the same category as revenge porn. Legislation has moved slower, but countries like Australia and states like Virginia and California have outlawed deepfake porn; Texas has banned deepfakes that may influence the outcome of an election. But deepfakers don’t die—they just go somewhere else. In 2021, the majority of deepfake adult content is found on a site so foul, so morally depraved, that I cannot even repeat the name! (Hint: it rhymes with “MrKeepsakes.com.”)

Mr. Deepfakes—er, I mean Mr. Keepsakes—is the central hive of deepfake porn on the open web. The website was founded in 2018 and currently hosts over 15,000 deepfakes. It also maintains a forum where members share technical knowledge and request deepfakes of public figures. I corresponded with the site’s administrator—Mr. Deepfakes himself—over encrypted email; his timezone confirmed he is outside of North American jurisdiction. Mr. Deepfakes told me that the most popular celebrities on the platform are Emma Watson, Scarlett Johannson, Gal Gadot, Natalie Portman, and Margot Robbie. Yet an unsettling new subgenre has also emerged on Mr. Deepfakes, conjoining the technology’s two worst-case uses: the pornographic and political deepfake. There now exist many frighteningly realistic pornographic deepfakes of Michelle Obama, Ivanka Trump, Melania Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Meghan Markle, Kate Middleton, and one of the most popular politicians of our era, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

On Mr. Deepfakes, one can peruse—out of the peripherals of their eyes, of course!—over 45 videos of AOC deepfake porn, encompassing every lustful act: footjobs, findom (financial domination), lactation, anal sex, cumshots, and getting slapped in the face. There’s videos with fake CNN chyrons (“Breaking News: AOC gets COCK after MASTURBATION”) and videos that juxtapose real clips of her working on Capitol Hill with foul deepfakery! Then there is the ultimate conclusion of the whole twisted endeavor: AOC deepfake virtual-reality porn.

“AOC deepfake VR porn,” in a way, perfectly encapsulates our post-2016 dystopia. Its elements only arose after 2016: we were introduced to deepfake porn in 2017, we met the Congresswoman in 2018, and now we’re putting VR headsets into every home in America. Anyone who’s ever watched VR porn (not me!) knows how real it feels—Genghis Khan himself could not have imagined the perverse power that deepfake VR porn bestows. Now any pervert can “know” (in the Biblical sense) literally any famous woman (or man) on Earth. Their admirers can disrobe them, their haters can humiliate them. Why even go outside when you can spend every moment in a virtual harem with the sexiest people of our time? Why download Tinder, why ask your crush to prom, why strive for anything in life, when you can spend your life with a VR headset strapped to your face, drooling and fapping like an idiot?

[Meet the Crusader Knight Who Fights Communists at Protests]

“I think it’s reprehensible,” said JT Kostman over the phone when I asked him about AOC deepfake porn. Kostman is the CEO of ProtectedBy.AI and led social media analysis for the 2012 Obama campaign. “It’s clearly exploitative and has no place in any moral person’s toolkit. I think you have a moral and ethical obligation not to partake in [watching deepfake porn].”

Yet the “AOC deepfake porn” Pandora’s box is already open. There’s a new AOC deepfake video almost every week on Mr. Deepfakes, and given the open-source nature of the technology combined with its enthusiastic community, we are primed for a deepfake porn revolution. Legislation will be fairly ineffectual, as it primarily targets the creators of the content, who are unlikely to be identified; Section 230 of the American “Communications Decency Act” immunizes platforms from liability. Countere spoke to Suzie Dunn, faculty of law at the University of Ottawa, who explained something we’ll call the “deepfake porn singularity”: that the technology has reached a point where it’s now capable of “learning how to improve itself.”

“If you look at the deepfakes from 2017 compared to the ones from 2021, they’re significantly better,” Dunn said. “And the way the technology works—through ‘generative adversarial networks’—is that it’s always doing comparisons and improving. So between the this type of artificial intelligence where it learns on its own through this machine learning process, and the hobbyist computer engineers and programmers who are also working to improve the open-source technology all the time...as long as time is moving forward, the [AOC] deepfakes will become more realistic.”

[I Sexted With a Robot and It Was Kind of Hot]

Not all deepfakes are malicious. At best, deepfake technology can introduce magic to entertainment—like bringing a dead actor back to the movie screen at much lower costs than traditional CGI, or making a music video by uploading a photo of a person and watching them sing a song. One could make a Godfather 2.5 with an 80-year-old Al Pacino playing a 40-year old Michael Corleone, Frank Sinatra can star in a new Ocean’s Eleven movie alongside George Clooney...the possibilities are endless.

Yet some deepfakes should be—must be—avoided at all costs. By the time you reach the end of this article, the phrase “AOC deepfake porn” will be burned into your brain. For the rest of your life, a demon will tug on your psyche, urging you to enter the garden of earthly delights—to purchase a VR headset, a sex toy whose vibrations will synchronize with your videos, and spend the rest of your days collecting unemployment and jerking it to virtual-reality deepfakes. But all you’ll be doing is punching a one-stop ticket to Hell! We at Countere have already written about how porn addiction is for NPCs. It’s best to open up the pages of the Bible instead. And if you’re looking for financial domination, you can go ahead and donate to AOC’s campaign here. 

Author’s Note: We’ve reached out to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign for comment. We will update this article if they respond.

Countere contributor Casey Gane-McCalla added reporting to this article.

Follow Countere Magazine on Instagram.