Your Tattoos Could Protect You From AI Deepfake Videos...For Now

12.08.2026, 17:36 allure.com

Getting a tattoo is an act of reclaiming your bodily autonomy. It may not seem that deep when, on a whim, you’re standing in a shop on the boardwalk picking out matching designs with friends. But even if that rose or swallow or bleeding heart has no meaning beyond looking awesome, you’ve made the conscious decision to permanently change your appearance in a way that has nothing to do with conforming to Western beauty standards.

Recently, some corners of the internet have become convinced that tattoos offer another type of bodily autonomy: Protection from having your likeness replicated in videos created by generative AI programs. Being covered in ink, the claim is, gives you a defense against deepfakes, because the current iteration of AI-powered video programs can’t handle all that artistic detail. (Programs that generate still photos have already advanced enough that tattoos shouldn’t be an issue for them.) “The more tattoos you have, the less believable it will be when they imitate your likeness because they can’t get the tattoos right on every single frame,” a creator named Ren said in one viral video.

This is a thrilling premise, perhaps especially among the tattoo-enthusiast set who I can anecdotally say from some previous reporting tends to lean more anti-AI than average. There has been a significant increase in deepfake videos, which, in addition to making it look like your cat has finally learned to do the Macarena, can be used for a wide range of malicious purposes: political propaganda, false advertising, child sexual abuse material—you name the insidious act, and it’s probably been done via deepfake. It would be a historically elegant truth too: As tattoo artist Jaylind pointed out in a video, for thousands of years, cultures across the world have used tattoos as a form of protection against physical and spiritual ailments.

According to the AI researchers I spoke to, it is kinda true that generative AI models have a tough time recreating tattoos in videos… at least, right at this moment. “There's a little bit of truth to it, but it's not quite right,” says Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and researcher who specializes in digital forensics and deepfake detection and has at least one tattoo of his own.

For as good as generative AI has gotten, simple visuals are what it recreates best. “It’s not that it struggles with tattoos, per se,” Farid says. “It’s that it struggles with details.” In other words, a wardrobe full of Dan Flashes shirts would arguably keep you just as protected as a tattoo sleeve.

There are also fewer people with visible ink than without—only 22% of people in the U.S. have more than one tattoo. That means the model training data set of people with tattoos is much smaller than the set of people without them, says Saetbyeol Leeyouk, a critical technologist and graduate student at MIT Media Lab whose work focuses on the intersection of ethics and AI.

But both Farid and Leeyouk say there is a big caveat here: We are talking about the capabilities these programs have right now in August 2026. If you’re going to say “tattoos make it harder for generative AI to recreate your likeness,” you have to end that sentence with “today,” Farid says. “Tomorrow, next week, next month, it’s going to get better. We know this.” Leeyouk agrees, saying “Eventually, [the tattoo issue] will be solved.”

For proof of this acceleration, Farid invites us all to remember the 2023 Will Smith eating spaghetti video, a nightmarish montage of vaguely Will Smith-shaped figures shoveling handfuls of pasta-like blobs into what could potentially pass as a human mouth if you were unfamiliar with the species. Less than three years later, a Reddit user generated an updated version that, as long as you aren’t looking too closely for a human soul behind the eyes, could definitely be a spaghetti commercial starring Will Smith.

These AI-generated videos are getting better because the programs are getting better at temporal coherence, which is a visual consistency between frames. “Temporal coherence has come from the fact that we’re not generating frame after frame after frame [to create a video,]” Farid explains. Rather than generating videos one still image at a time—Will Smith eating spaghetti is Eadweard Muybridge’s horse for the internet age—these newer programs can generate a short video clip all at once.

There are limits on how long those clips can be—Farid says about 10 to 15 seconds—which is why, for right now, your tattoos probably would get messed up in any longer generated video, which is just a bunch of short clips back to back. “If you have a fair number of [tattoos] and I made a video of you, they’d probably move a little bit from clip to clip,” he says.

But how much will that little bit of movement actually matter? Leeyouk points out that, particularly in the case of non-consensual sexual deepfakes (an area of research focus for her), “the purpose of that is not just the [video] itself, but to humiliate the victim,” she says. Whether they got the shading on your neotraditional snake exactly right probably won’t matter much to you if your likeness is being stolen for a nefarious purpose.

So is there anything that could protect you from being deepfaked? “Build a bunker and go off the grid,” Farid, who lives on 100 acres of forest in rural Vermont, says. “Five years ago, it was the Scarlett Johanssons of the world who were vulnerable to deepfakes because you needed thousands of images and hours of voice recordings. Today, a single image of you, 10 seconds of your voice, it’s over.” Even if you don’t post much online, someone wearing a pair of Meta Glasses could capture much more than that just when you’re walking down the street.

Leeyouk is worried that the videos claiming tattoos offer some sort of protection will mislead people into a false sense of security. “I know that people are actively seeking [ways] to protect themselves from being deepfaked,” she says. “But we really should push politicians or technicians to take charge on this, not be searching for ways that individuals can protect themselves.”

When I asked if there’s anything to be optimistic about here (like, really, I’ll take anything at all!!!) Leeyouk says that as AI programs advance, so will the tools to detect content produced by them “If those types of detection techniques are getting better, it means that, from the monitoring side, we can easily sort out which ones are AI-generated and which ones contain real victims,” she says.

So, no, you don’t need to rush out and get a bunch of tattoos to protect yourself from deepfakes—what protection they offer now will likely fade. “There are plenty of good reasons to get tattoos,” Farid says. “But tattoos are not going to save you from the AI overlords.” At least everyone who went out and got some already will look cool for the singularity.

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