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Barring some development in physics that enable something like time travel, I don't see how an AI program like that could even theoretically be possible. The information just isn't there, and it's trivial to come up with extremely plausible examples where no AI could reconstruct the exact way someone looks naked - e.g. if someone has a tattoo on their stomach or something.
As such, I don't see this as a gradient. When we're talking about AI or deepfakes, we're necessarily talking about using computers to create brand new illustrations that didn't exist before. In the future, AI could (and likely will) get so much better that we could use clothed pictures of someone to easily and quickly create illustrations of that person that look, to a very high degree of accuracy, as if it were just a nude photo of that person. However, given that that accuracy can't get to 100% or even all that close to it, it's categorically different from, say, snapping a nude photograph of that person.
To me, the strongest argument against deepfakes is the potential distress caused to someone who might accidentally (or intentionally, for that matter) run into such things of themselves. I place this in the same category of suffering as the suffering of some Fundamentalist Christian or Muslim at observing gay people kissing or a cartoon of Mohammed; given how much damage some gay couple or a bunch of pixels can do to these individuals (i.e. none) it's suffering caused entirely by the individual's decision to deem those things as causing themselves suffering. A bunch of pixels that are arranged to look like an accurate photograph of someone nude simply lacks the ability to do anything to affect that person beyond what that person chooses. At best, perhaps a bunch of people jacking it to pictures of someone would lead to those people treating that person differently, but a. I don't particularly see why this would be true and b. even if it were, the issue would be the people choosing to treat that person differently, not in them having access to such pictures.
I've been thinking a lot of this question given certain internet drama I'm plugged into and this analogy was really helpful to me to firm up my own internal position on this so thanks.
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