You might not like the art, but deepfakes are not harmful.
Maybe that’s an art form, but it’s also clearly potentially harmful in the same way as revenge porn, teenage nude selfies, and other cases where regular people and porn intersect.
I'd say it's not the thing itself that's a problem, it's publishing whatever you create as if it's real. There are many things in life that are potentially harmful, but are part of everyday life since nobody actually harms anyone with them.
How is someone harmed by someone else producing video that features people who look like them? The whole "seeing is believing" thing hasn't been true for ages, every movie is half CG these days.
I would perhaps buy the premise if deepfakes were sprung on the scene in the 70s or 80s, but the 90s and 2000s have inundated so many with completely fantastical high res CG imagery that nobody thinks videos are proof of anything anymore.
Now why does it make a difference if the video is real or not? It's still a video of a nude body with your face on it.
I find this whole deepfake-porn trend to be incredibly disgusting. And it just saddens me that heterosexual males apparently immediately have to exploit such things for their own hornyness. I guess this is also the reason why this topic is not being criticized as much, because the people who develop and consume these videos can't comprehend how disrespectful it all is towards the people (women) who are being deepfaked AND especially the results being shared online, in most cases publicly.
Then why should it be illegal to do the same with an AI?