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Fake celeb nudes created with programs like Photoshop have been popular for decades, I remember there being sites dedicated to them, how porn forums would have subforums for them, and how people got annoyed when they inevitably got mixed into collections of actual celeb nudes. (During the moral panic about deepfakes a few years ago the subreddit for them was banned.) So discussion of deepfakes should account for the fact that they aren't particularly novel. The main difference is that they can be used for video.
Incidentally while I don't think I ever heard of a celebrity commenting on nude photoshops, I remember at least one who stopped doing nude/sex scenes because with the internet people could share videos of those scenes without the rest of the movie.
Maybe. Couldn't it be true that these types of images were unethical to create/consume for as long as they've existed, and there just wasn't proper recognition of the problem?
Another commenter brought up the fact that perhaps a significant reason as to why at least distributing deepfake porn is immoral could be because, by nature of the fact that one makes them openly accessible on the internet in order to be distributed, one makes it likely that whomever the deepfakes depict will find out that such porn is being made of them, and it is specifically the psychological harm inflicted by knowing porn like this exists of oneself that accounts for (or accounts for the majority) of why such porn is unethical for people to make or consume. This would also explain why previous iterations of 'fake nudes' weren't as highly debated: because they weren't as commonly distributed until now (perhaps because they weren't as realistic, and thus not as popular).
Manually created photoshops are generally higher quality than deepfakes, doing it with AI is just more automated, and thus more useful for applications like video, more obscure celebrities, or larger quantities. I'd say that as a proportion of the internet and of internet pornography, celeb nudes (both real and fake) have noticeably gone down. In 2006 one of the earlier Simpsons episodes referencing the internet has Comic Book Guy downloading nude Captain Janeway. (I'm not sure if Kate Mulgrew had any real nudes, but I guess that might be different in the world of The Simpsons anyway.) Janet Jackson's 2004 Superbowl nipslip was a major inspiration for creating Youtube. It's just that the internet as a whole has grown, so celeb nudes are now smaller compared to behemoths like Pornhub even if larger in absolute terms. And of course now celebrities themselves have an internet presence, and there are all sorts of micro-celebrities, while the culture might be less focused on the biggest celebrities than it was.
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