How AI nudify apps are proliferating on social media

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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (0:31)
Newtified images are generally banned online, but the tools to make them are being promoted all over social media. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.
A proliferation of AI apps that allow users to create sexualized images of real people have grown into a multi-million-dollar industry, and social media platforms are serving as de facto gateways to these services. Despite the fact that most prohibit the sharing or promotion of this kind of non-consensual, intimate imagery. That's according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Sina Laubenstein is their Director of Programs.

**Sina Laubenstein** (1:27)
So, we did a scoping exercise looking to see if we can find websites promoting these tools, and we've actually found pretty quickly 181 websites offering tools that allow users to upload images of real people and generate notified images or videos based on those images.
A lot of this traffic was also driven by social media platforms. And I'm not speaking of fringe platforms here and the so-called dark corners of the internet, but actually by platforms such as YouTube, X, Facebook and Instagram, which served kind of like as gateways to these sites and to these tools. But what we've seen is that especially YouTube and X actually were driving forces.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (2:14)
And can you give me some examples of how these might sort of show up on those platforms?

**Sina Laubenstein** (2:20)
It's been actually quite easy. So, we are looking for how can I access a unified tool? Where can I find unified content or just plainly unified tool? And that's how these things are showing up.
Especially on the meta platforms, we've seen that there is also ads promoting these tools both on Facebook and on Instagram. For example, we've seen identical ads promoting a unified tool that was posted over 600 times. And sometimes these ads were removed. And a lot of times, these ads just have been running for months.
And a lot of these ads are using stock or AI generated images. They are using often identical texts. So it's not super creative. It's not coded language. It's really just these are the top 10 unified tools. We've seen bots on Telegram promoting unified tools, saying this is the best unified tool. If you use this, you will never need another one. So it's so easily available and so easily accessible, I think was actually quite surprising to us.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (3:31)
We'll be right back.

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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (5:04)
You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino. We're back with Sina Laubenstein at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
So you identified that platforms like YouTubeX, Facebook are helping to sort of promote these services. Have any of those companies engaged with your report after publishing it? Have they responded?

**Sina Laubenstein** (5:28)
Yes. Some of the platforms that were mentioned, and also some platforms that were actually not mentioned, have been reaching out afterwards and asking us for URLs, or the keywords that we're using to ensure that they can take down the content. And what's actually been quite interesting to see as well is that also app stores have been quite active to take down some of these apps or adjust their settings. So when you're looking for a notified tool, you're not being guided to these apps and tools anymore, which is not to say that these apps do not exist in the app stores anymore, but they are not as easily to find anymore. But one big issue I actually have with this is, and again, it's not hidden. A lot of times it's violating the terms of service, the community standards. So I do think they could be a lot more engaged on this.