Seeing is not believing, since the porn peddlers are busy adapting software to insert your face in any ol’ smutty scenario they want.

Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we’re on the verge of living in a world where it’s trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.

But of course these tools are being refined to appropriate women’s images — it’s what this culture does. I’m sure the gay porn will be following along shortly.

It’s interesting that they’re reporting on the work of a single guy, “deepfakes”, who’s basically a script kiddie churning through existing software to slap celebrity faces on pornographic movies, as if that is some grand achievement. No one is questioning his motives, in part because he’s got enough shame left in him that he doesn’t let his identity out.

According to deepfakes—who declined to give his identity to me to avoid public scrutiny—the software is based on multiple open-source libraries, like Keras with TensorFlow backend. To compile the celebrities’ faces, deepfakes said he used Google image search, stock photos, and YouTube videos. Deep learning consists of networks of interconnected nodes that autonomously run computations on input data. In this case, he trained the algorithm on porn videos and Gal Gadot’s face. After enough of this “training,” the nodes arrange themselves to complete a particular task, like convincingly manipulating video on the fly.

Artificial intelligence researcher Alex Champandard told me in an email that a decent, consumer-grade graphics card could process this effect in hours, but a CPU would work just as well, only more slowly, over days.

“This is no longer rocket science,” Champandard said.

I’ve seen several articles on this subject recently. Oddly, no one seems to be asking deepfakes why he’s doing this, which also says something about the culture. I guess it’s taken for granted that guys with expensive computers will sink hours of time into this strange hobby of making obsessive masturbation aids.

It mainly seems to be women and sex workers who are questioning the ethics of their behavior.

Porn performer Grace Evangeline told me over Twitter direct messages that porn stars are used to having their work spread around free to tube sites like SendVid, where the Gal Gadot fake is uploaded, without their permission. But she said that this was different. She’d never seen anything like this.

“One important thing that always needs to happen is consent,” Evangeline said. “Consent in private life as well as consent on film. Creating fake sex scenes of celebrities takes away their consent. It’s wrong.”

Even for people whose livelihoods involve getting in front of a camera, the violation of personal boundaries is troubling. I showed Alia Janine, a retired porn performer who was in the sex industry for 15 years, the video of Gadot. “It’s really disturbing,” she told me over the phone. “It kind of shows how some men basically only see women as objects that they can manipulate and be forced to do anything they want… It just shows a complete lack of respect for the porn performers in the movie, and also the female actresses.”

It’s a collision of pedestrian realities, that some men will go to great lengths to make simulated sex that won’t involve interacting with icky women, and that they feel no obligation to respect other human beings.

Courtland Sykes is a candidate for the US Senate from Missouri. He has certain opinions about feminists. Fasten your seatbelts, this is going to accelerate fast.

“I want to come home to a home cooked dinner every night at six,” Sykes said, referring to demands he makes of his girlfriend. “One that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives.”

According to Sykes, feminists push an agenda that they “made up to suit their own nasty snake-filled heads.”

The candidate said that he hoped his daughters do not grow up to be “career obsessed banshees who forgo home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the top of a thousand tall buildings they are [SIC] think they could have leaped in a single bound — had men not been ‘suppressing them.’ It’s just nuts.”

You banshees! How dare you! Courtland is hungry. Make him a sandwich, because he doesn’t know how and will starve if no woman serves him!

I agree with his last sentence. It is just nuts.

You’re not going to elect him, are you, Missourians?

I stand amazed at the progress we have made. People work together to aid those in need…like at The President’s Club Charity Dinner in London. They’re trying to raise money for hospitals! How can one possibly criticize them for that?

You can trust men to fuck it up.

It is for men only. A black tie evening, Thursday’s event was attended by 360 figures from British business, politics and finance and the entertainment included 130 specially hired hostesses.

All of the women were told to wear skimpy black outfits with matching underwear and high heels. At an after-party many hostesses — some of them students earning extra cash — were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned.

They’ve been doing this for 33 years, in relative obscurity, which has only been broken because a couple of women went undercover as “hostesses” to discover what shenanigans were going on. It was an unpleasant night for them.

At 10pm last Thursday night, Jonny Gould took to the stage in the ballroom at London’s Dorchester Hotel. “Welcome to the most un-PC event of the year,” he roared.

That was an omen. I’ve noticed that only assholes take pride in not being “PC”. That’s exactly what it was, too: a parade of privileged assholes letting their hair down to just be themselves, i.e. deplorable and unpleasant.

The nature of the occasion was hinted at when the hostesses were hired. The task of finding women for the dinner is entrusted to Caroline Dandridge, founder of Artista, an agency specialising in hosts and hostesses for what it claims to be some of the “UK’s most prestigious occasions”.

At their initial interviews, women were warned by Ms Dandridge that the men in attendance might be “annoying” or try to get the hostesses “pissed”. One hostess was advised to lie to her boyfriend about the fact it was a male-only event. “Tell him it’s a charity dinner,” she was told.

“It’s a Marmite job. Some girls love it, and for other girls it’s the worst job of their life and they will never do it again . . . You just have to put up with the annoying men and if you can do that it’s fine,” Ms Dandridge told the hostess.

Two days before the event, Ms Dandridge told prospective hostesses by email that their phones would be “safely locked away” for the evening and that boyfriends and girlfriends were not welcome at the venue.

The uniform requirements also became more detailed: all hostesses should bring “BLACK sexy shoes”, black underwear, and do their hair and make-up as they would to go to a “smart sexy place”. Dresses and belts would be supplied on the day.

For those who met the three specific selection criteria (“tall, thin and pretty”) a job paying £150, plus £25 for a taxi home, began at 4pm.

Now I wonder, though — I bet the attendees are furious right now at being exposed. Caroline Dandridge is probably being angrily denounced by organizers for having let a few spies sneak in. No one is upset by their behavior, but only at being caught in this behavior.

I also wonder whether the President’s Club Charity Dinner will take place next year, whether it will change its rules, and whether anyone will attend. Were the attendees actually there for an opportunity to assist worthy charities, or for the opportunity to harass and abuse women with their good sexist buddies?

When Garrison Keillor was fired for “inappropriate behavior”, the only explanation we got was Keillor’s: he’d merely touched a woman’s back, in an innocuous, friendly way. This has gone too far, some people raged, when harmless social behavior can get you fired! The problem was that MPR was silent. They gave no details about what had actually driven them to give him the boot, so only Keillor’s narrative was out there.

No longer. MPR News has published a long account of Keillor’s problematic history.

An investigation by MPR News, however, has learned of a years-long pattern of behavior that left several women who worked for Keillor feeling mistreated, sexualized or belittled. None of those incidents figure in the “inappropriate behavior” cited by MPR when it severed business ties.

Nor do they have anything to do with Keillor’s story about putting a hand on a woman’s back:

• In 2009, a subordinate who was romantically involved with Keillor received a check for $16,000 from his production company and was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement which, among other things, barred her from ever divulging personal or confidential details about him or his companies. She declined to sign the agreement, and never cashed the check.

• In 2012, Keillor wrote and publicly posted in his bookstore an off-color limerick about a young woman who worked there and the effect she had on his state of arousal.

• A producer fired from The Writer’s Almanac in 1998 sued MPR, alleging age and sex discrimination, saying Keillor habitually bullied and humiliated her and ultimately replaced her with a younger woman.

• A 21-year-old college student received an email in 2001 in which Keillor, then her writing instructor at the University of Minnesota, revealed his “intense attraction” to her.

MPR News has interviewed more than 60 people who worked with or crossed professional paths with Keillor. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still work in the industry or feared repercussions from Keillor or his attorneys.

The article tries to portray both the good and bad sides of Keillor, but you can’t escape the broad conclusion: he was a bad boss, autocratic and oblivious, and was only tolerable while you were on his good side.

People who worked with him across the decades say Keillor could be funny, charming, compassionate and gracious.

By other accounts, he could be cruel and dismissive. The office was driven by his moods, former colleagues say. A common complaint is he would punish his staff with prolonged aggressive silence, as Fleischman described.

He also grew tired of and discarded musicians, writers and staff, many of whom had been loyal to Keillor for years. Some employees were terminated without warning.

I now understand better why MPR should have tired of supporting him. There’s still a mystery, though: none of the stuff cited in the article was part of the specific case that led to MPR firing him. Only one person, Jon McTaggart, president of MPR, “knew the content of the allegations against Keillor”, and those haven’t been revealed yet. I don’t think the story is quite closed.

File that face under “C”, for creep.

You’re married, and you describe a much younger employee as your “soul mate”, and you think that’s OK, even though she never reciprocated or expressed similar statements.

Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.) sought to defend himself against an accusation of sexual harassment Tuesday, saying he “developed an affection” for a decades-younger staffer he considered his “soul mate” but never sought a romantic or sexual relationship with her.

You get upset when you discover she is dating someone her age, who you don’t know.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday — Meehan’s first lengthy response to the New York Times report — the four-term congressman denied engaging in harassment. He acknowledged lashing out when he learned the aide had started seriously dating someone outside his congressional office, attributing his reaction to the stress of a debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act.

“I started to talk to her about my reaction to [her relationship] and you know, selfishly I was thinking about what this was going to mean to me,” he told the Inquirer, adding that he “should have been looking at it from the perspective of a subordinate and a superior.”

I don’t know what that last bit means. So he should have ordered her, as her boss, to stop dating other men? It’s a bit ambiguous.

She accuses you of sexual harassment, and you actually settle for some large unspecified sum — not paid out of your pocket, obviously, but rather with taxpayer’s money.

Meehan settled with the former aide last year using taxpayer dollars after she filed a formal complaint of sexual harassment. The revelation of the settlement in a report by the New York Times on Saturday led to Meehan’s expulsion from the House Ethics Committee, which began investigating his behavior this week.

You are brought before an ethics hearing where you still insist that there was nothing abusive about your “relationship”, despite admitting guilt with a payoff, despite admitting that you’d been possessive of this woman, and despite openly talking about having an imaginary deeper relationship with her.

You know, by this point you ought to realize that you really are a great big creep, and that you’ve been oblivious.

But no can do: he’s a Republican.