Back in 2020, deepfake expert Henry Ajder identified a bot on the messaging app Telegram that “undressed” photos and generated over 100,000 explicit images—some of which were of minors. This, of course, raised serious concerns about the dark side of AI.
Things haven’t gotten much better.
Videos by VICE
This week, WIRED reviewed activity on Telegram and discovered at least 50 bots that apparently create similar explicit photos and videos.
Using AI technology similar to the DeepNude app, the bots generate fake nude images of women from regular photos. Users can simply upload any clothed photo of any woman and receive a fabricated nude image or fake sexual video in return, often within minutes.
According to WIRED, these bots have over 4 million monthly users combined. That’s likely just a portion of what’s actually out there, and that’s… incredibly concerning.
“We’re talking about a significant, orders-of-magnitude increase in the number of people who are clearly actively using and creating this kind of content,” said Ajder, in the new article.
“It is really concerning that these tools—which are really ruining lives and creating a very nightmarish scenario primarily for young girls and for women—are still so easy to access and to find on the surface web, on one of the biggest apps in the world.”
Back in 2020, one cybersecurity firm claimed to find images of 100,000 women. That’s basically one woman per user. And now there’s 4 million users.
“These types of fake images can harm a person’s health and well-being by causing psychological trauma and feelings of humiliation, fear, embarrassment, and shame,” added Emma Pickering, head of technology-facilitated abuse and economic empowerment at Refuge, the largest UK domestic abuse organization for women.
Telegram, which recently apologized to South Korea for its deepfake porn issue, doesn’t exactly have a reputation for addressing exploitation on its platform.
“Telegram provides you with the search functionality, so it allows you to identify communities, chats, and bots,” said Ajder. “It provides the bot-hosting functionality, so it’s somewhere that provides the tooling in effect. Then it’s also the place where you can share it and actually execute the harm in terms of the end result.”
