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 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.