Apps and websites that use artificial intelligence to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, according to researchers.
In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing websites, according to the social network analysis company Graphika.
Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, according to Graphika. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400% on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only work on women.
These apps are part of a worrying trend of non-consensual pornography being developed and distributed because of advances in artificial intelligence — a type of fabricated media known as deepfake pornography. Its proliferation runs into serious legal and ethical hurdles, as the images are often taken from social media and distributed without the consent, control or knowledge of the subject.
This is going to be such a culture shift. Kids today are going to grow up in a world where anyone can make any image or video of any person at any time. I have no idea how this will impact sexual health and development or if really it will even be a bad thing. It could lead to more openness and freedom, kind of like growing up with the Internet did. It could also have some really harmful unexpected consequences…kinda like how growing up with the Internet did…
It’s teaching kids to keep all of their photos private, like we always should have done from the beginning. Your face, your likeness, your privacy, there are malicious and greedy people out there that want what you have.
Why did we ever start publicly sharing anything?
I feel the same way about biometrics. When I tell friends, family, and coworkers about this, they look at me like I’m crazy. You can change your password. You can’t change your retinal pattern, fingerprint, etc.
And I don’t care how much someone tries to convince me on how securely it’s stored inside the phone hardware or the cloud. You are trusting every single coder and engineer who has a hand in designing and maintaining these things. Not to mention hackers who always find a way to breach.
So far I’ve avoided using any of mine anywhere.
Can malicious people who steal you retinal and fingerprint duplicate it to unlock whatever it was protecting?
I think it’s only a matter of time, if it hasn’t happened already. When you scan your bio-metric data (fingerprint or whatever) it gets stored somewhere as a pattern of numbers. A clever and talented bad actor could, in theory, recreate or spoof that pattern of numbers in a variety of different ways. Hackers are very good at finding exploits that application coders never thought of. We have all sorts of virtual devices that emulate physical devices. It stands to reason that “virtual fingerprints” could easily be a thing.
Also, bio-metrics are “super easy and convenient” which has a tendency to make people get a little too apathetic / casual about security. And by people I mean everyone involved from the user up through all the layers of engineers and testers to the C-suite.
It’s an over-arching problem with security in general. Good security is both inconvenient and expensive. People want profits and convenience.
I’m going to hold off on using my bio-metrics for as long as I can. Though I can imagine a future where that is no longer possible, unfortunately
I think even that is ultimately a lost cause. There are cameras everywhere and there’s getting to be more. Facebook is trying to get us all used to having cameras right on our face at all times. Even if you could completely block your face from every camera, how long until the AI equivalent of a police sketch artist just remakes your face from someone’s description?
The difference is the source. If someone pulls a screen grab of you from a Target security camera and uses AI to make porn, the employee has a problem because Target has a problem. If you take photos of yourself at the beach and share them via Facebook, then anyone anywhere can end up with that photo and use it for almost anything with no problem because you took it and shared it publicly.
Hopefully this gets people to realize how much they are giving up by sharing via Facebook, and Instagram, and Xitter, and TicTac or whatever. If you want to be social media famous, be famous. But fame comes at a price.
I could easily imagine a simple brain/computer interface - not even requiring an implant, just one of those helmet or headband things - where you are looking at a screen while thinking about a person that you remember. The AI starts tweaking the image on the screen and monitoring how closely your brain is registering a “match” to the image you’re thinking of, until eventually it’s spot on.
Won’t guarantee that you remembered perfectly, of course. But no camera required for something like this.
Turns out it’s often kids doing it to other kids, which is deeply concerning.
I’m gonna be straight with you, I don’t even want to click that link.
It’s a BBC News story :)
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This is such a weird mentality and so bizarre that it’s common within a certain set of people. You’re going to hide in a darkened room refusing to interact with the world and not sharing anything because you’re scared someone will make an image of you?
Oh gosh a greedy person stole my likeness because they wanted what I have! What ever will I do?!?!
Your likeness isn’t special or magical, it’s not going to grant people special psychic power over you or allow someone else to claim your rewards in the afterlife, it’s just a picture in a sea of a billion pictures - so what?
They are already doing that shit, back in 2013 it was done with something called bubbling.
https://gizmodo.com/get-anyone-naked-with-the-pic-bubbler-iphone-app-5656093
I remember being in high school and I remember people sharing nude images of each other on those old ass snap a picture cell phones. Or a couple of my cousins going on facebook and rating all the women 1 to 10.
And before people were doing it was computers they were doing it with their imagination.
Same new shit same old story, it’s all going to be fine.
We need to go back to the days of bubble porn and Photoshop. Oooo the humanity
I would imagine it’s likely to empower all kinds of unhealthy and concerning behaviors. People are fucking weird and if you can use AI to create a kind of virtualized sex slave out of the publicly available data on any person you know, that could be a real problem for society.
I honestly think something like that is going to be as much or more of a harm for the person making/using it. When the world is just flooded with fake images I think we’re gonna get jaded by them very quickly and it will be just another form of (really fucked up) cyberbullying.
For the people making them the harm is more insidious. They’re likely to be doing it in secret (because weird/immoral sex stuff) and isolating themselves, and we end up in a weird Futurama Lucy Liu-Bot situation with even more social isolation and further declining mental health.
It’s almost like swords that are double edged
By 2030 we’ll have AR glasses with cameras, microphones, speakers, and a built in AI assistant that will digitally remove everyone’s clothing in real time.
We’re finally going to learn if the “imagine everyone in their underwear” trick for public speaking really works.
Great tip. Now you’re nervous with boner
Great “tip”… 😋
Hello yes I don’t actually know what you look like because my VR glasses are converting everyone into the living image of Danny DeVito
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Nah, definitely not real time by 2030. That’s not that far away. Maybe you could snap a single picture, have that uploaded into the cloud and sent back to you naked after half a minute or so…
You can do that right now. Today.
Using such glasses? I realized, I didn’t explicitly say that in the comment you replied to…
I didn’t make that connection.
I don’t have experience with either glasses nor “nudify” apps, but I’ve used AI photo editing directly. There is nothing stopping this from being real today.
Yeah, I do also think, it could be built today. But I mainly just don’t expect such glasses to have enough mass market appeal that it would actually be available by 2030…
Food for thought: sex and porn drive technology. An app that does this could even be a “killer app” that drives adoption. As bad as that would be. It could also be the app that gets them banned everywhere and destroys the product for public adoption.
Shit, by 2030 we’ll have premium AR avatars, so you can make sure your AI nudes look good.
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Interesting take
I hope you don’t bet money, friend. Those two things aren’t equally likely at all. Not in that time frame.
Pandora’s Box is already opened, unfortunately. The Streisand Effect is only going to make this worse.
The only real options for response for a celebrity or public figure is 1) say nothing or 2) make light of it by saying something like, “I’m flattered, they made me look better than I do!”
I’d imagine this will also be very problematic for non-celebrities from all sorts of backgrounds as well. The harassment potential is very concerning.
Agreed. Just need to teach our kids that it literally isn’t the end of the world and how to deal with it.
All that’s going to do is give abusers power over others.
What really needs to happen is for that kind of tech, and more importantly using any software, AI or not, to do such a thing, to be outlawed. It shouldn’t be protected under the first amendment.
Unfortunately, that isn’t going to do much.
It would prevent a child in school from creating such an image and openly sharing it because it would be illegal.
All that’s going to do is give abusers power over others
no, they’re proposing NOT giving abusers power.
Or Taylor Swift go brrr. Don’t get me wrong, I support her actions.
This article seems to imply that this cat can go back in the bag. I’m not at all sure about that.
If they put the cat in the bag I can just use one of these handy apps to make the bag disappear again.
Yet another way to free the pussy.
It can see nude cats too?!
This panic over fake porn is the wrong response. In fact, encourage it, make it so ubiquitous that there is always fake porn of everyone, everywhere and nobody gives two shits about nude leaks or revenge porn any more.
Surely you can see how this also isn’t a fitting solution. Just… Go down the age brackets and see how increasingly uncomfortable it all becomes to tolerate this. There’s already been cases of AI porn of highschoolers made by highschoolers. We can keep going down the victim age line, or up the perpetrator age line. It gets bad pretty fast regardless of how ubiquitous this might become in the future.
There isn’t another answer though. The tech is there, it will only get worse to the point we can’t recognize a fake any more. It makes much more sense to lean into it and make sure before that point is reached that it doesn’t ruin peoples lives any more to have that stuff circulated.
Even with the age brackets. Porn of someone you know is just weird. We’ve progressed too far into the wrong direction. Imagine if people put this much effort into curing cancer.
Another day another puritan panic
Yes we should ban open source and consumer gfx cards and everything else to stop the possibility that someone might have a sexual thought -in fact all humans should be blinded at birth to avoid this!
Won’t someone think of the children!!!
This will get bloody. Some western woman and teenager will running the gauntlet of harassment and embarrassment. Some will even suicide because of those fake photos. In other parts of the world, where father and brothers kill family members for shame, it might be even a bloodbath. Imagine living as a woman under a patriarchate where you get in trouble when a curl of hair is visible. Now imagine there are fake nudes about you while you are surrounded by religious fanatics who have a deep routed history of shame and family honour. Look at Mia Khalifa. Woman will die because of this and the backward archaic anachronistic worldview of some insecure weak man.
On the plus side, this will be the death knell for those sorts of extreme cultures. It’ll be impossible for them to survive and still have these kinds of hangups in a world where such mortal offences are present everywhere you look.
It’ll be a nasty path getting there, unfortunately.
Okay, so we need to get unique codes tattooed onto our genitals. That way if your nudes show up, you can always know for sure if they’re real or fake (and, importantly, who tf leaked your nudes)
Public key in a pubic place?
Pubic key, clearly.
Or who knows, maybe nudity will cease to be taboo when everyone can see everyone else naked anyway.
So basically how it is outside of America?
Pubic keys
I’d be able to tell because there’s no way an AI has been trained on my lumpy potato body covered in hair in weird places.
How would you know who did it with such a code?
Also it only works once since you need to reveal the true code to dispute the picture
Why would you willingly forfeit plausible deniability?
Naaaahhhh we didn’t see this coming at all. Golly gee this is a total shock that this is happening.
Combining this with AR goggles, you really will be able to see everyone else naked when you’re giving a speech.
It’ll work in their favour eventually. There won’t be any more revenge porn because it can just be dismissed as fake immediately.
(Immediately downloads, tries it on selfie)
I actually thought about this. I even turned on the VPN and googled these sites. NGL I thought about people I know. Then I thought that as soon as I uploaded my or their images, and did this, both the original and anything generated are out there, and can never be pulled back. And who knows where they might pop up, or what they might be turned into? And then I got kinda scared, and closed that shit out.
Disgusting! Where are people downloading this app from so that I can avoid the website or that app store?
Models from CivitAi, and Automatic1111/ComfyUI for front-end. The rest is just a learning curve for all the features and prompting.
I’ve made this comment other places, I’ll make it here. This tech changes much less than people think. If anything, this will protect people from leaking of nudes because people will assume it’s probably fake.
All this is is an advanced form of fantasy that has existed ever since photoshop has existed. And importantly, we will deal with these nude photos the exact same way we deal with real nudes.
Meaning, if you catch people distributing fake photos of their classmates, the punishment should be the same as if they were real. And they need to be severe.
The reason this is a problem and I’m concerned for young women is that protections for sexual harassment online have already been abysmal. So this will make things worse and since we don’t protect women very well in the US, I expect major issues. Basically, the problems aren’t new, but our lack of action will make this awful. Treated correctly, this is a non-issue and these photos should be kept in private.
Nowhere in the article did it mention what the apps were. I’d just like to know what they are so I can avoid them.
Dude… this isn’t the place for attempted humor.
why?
