In an even more disturbing example of the ways in which generative porn tech is being used, there’s been a small but meaningful uptick in the amount of photorealistic AI-generated child sexual abuse material circulating on the dark web. Just a few months ago, a 22-year-old was sentenced to six months in jail for taking underage womens’ photos from social media and using them to create sexually explicit deepfakes. The vast majority of pornographic deepfakes on the web depict women, in truth - and frequently, they’re weaponized.Ī Washington Post piece recounts how a small-town school teacher lost her job after students’ parents learned about AI porn made in the teacher’s likeness without her consent. To this day, the targeted creators receive copies of the images via DMs as a form of harassment.

The creator of the deepfaked images eventually succumbed to pressure, agreeing to delete them. Twitch personality Brandon Ewing, known online as Atrioc, was recently caught on stream looking at nonconsensually deepfaked sexual images of well-known women streamers on Twitch. No easy answersĪs AI porn and the tools to create it become commodified, they’re beginning to have frightening real-world impacts. As for the images, while they aren’t perfect, some could well be mistaken for professional artwork.Īnd the ethical questions have only grown. People in the synthetic porn had extra limbs or a nipple where their nose should be, among other disconcerting, fleshy contortions.įast-forward to today, and a search for “AI porn generator” turns up dozens of results across the web - many of which are free to use.

The apps and the AI models underpinning them struggled to understand the nuances of anatomy, often generating physically bizarre subjects that wouldn’t be out of place in a Cronenberg film. And the results weren’t what anyone would call “good.” When TechCrunch covered efforts to create AI porn generators nearly a year ago, the apps were nascent and relatively few and far between. And like its more respectable sibling, it’s improving. As generative AI enters the mainstream, so, too, does AI-generated porn.

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