A Deepfake Porn Bot Is Being Used to Abuse Thousands of Women
Pornographic deepfakes are being weaponized at an alarming scale with at least 104,000 women targeted by a bot operating on the messaging app Telegram since July. The bot is used by thousands of people every month who use it to create nude images of friends and family members, some of whom appear to be under the age of 18.
The still images of nude women are generated by an AI that ‘removes’ items of clothing from a non-nude photo. Every day the bot sends out a gallery of new images to an associated Telegram channel which has almost 25,000 subscribers. The sets of images are frequently viewed more 3,000 times. A separate Telegram channel that promotes the bot has more than 50,000 subscribers.
Some of the images produced by the bot are glitchy but many could pass for genuine. “It is maybe the first time that we are seeing these at a massive scale,” says Giorgio Patrini, CEO and chief scientist at deepfake detection company Sensity, which conducted the research. The company is publicizing its findings in a bid to pressure services hosting the content to remove it but is not publicly naming the Telegram channels involved.
