'It was about degrading someone completely': the story of Mr DeepFakes - the world's most notorious AI porn site The hobbyists who helped build this site created technology that has been used to humiliate countless women. Why didn't governments step in and stop them? For Patrizia Schlosser, it started with an apologetic call from a colleague. "I'm sorry but I found this. Are you aware of it?"

Charlotte Owen: 'The Lords were blown away by these brilliant women.' Charlotte Owen: 'The Lords were blown away by these brilliant women.' 'I don't take no for an answer': how a small group of women changed the law on deepfake porn For Jodie*, watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory. It was certainly more than most survivors of deepfake image-based abuse could expect. They had met as students and bonded over their shared love of music. In the years since graduation, he'd also become her support system, the friend she reached for each time she learned that her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent.

"Instead of heeding our call to remove its'NSFW' AI chatbot, xAI appears to be doubling down on furthering sexual exploitation by enabling AI videos to create nudity," said Haley McNamara, a senior vice president at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. "There's no confirmation it won't create pornographic content that resembles a recognizable person. Here's what to know about the new rollout. The latest xAI update arrives amid public concern about deepfakes. Around three-quarters of U.S. adults are in favor of restricting the use of digitally altered videos and images, per a 2019 poll from the Pew Research Center.

But speaking on the issue of deepfake porn, she said: "The people behind this... don't realise the consequences in the real world when they do something like that... It plays across into people taking actual real world actions against ourselves." Mordaunt became aware that her face had been used in deepfake porn after a Channel 4 documentary by Cathy Newman last year revealed that Mordaunt, Tory colleague Dame Priti Patel, Labour's Angela Rayner and several other senior female politicians were victims of the practice. At the time, Newman revealed she was also a victim. "It was violating... it was kind of me and not me," she said, explaining the video displayed her face but not her hair. Earlier this year, the government unveiled plans to make the creation or distribution of sexually explicit deepfakes a criminal offence, following a surge in their proliferation over recent years.

In late November, a deepfake porn maker claiming to be based in the US uploaded a sexually explicit video to the world's largest site for pornographic deepfakes, featuring TikTok influencer Charli D'Amelio's face superimposed onto a porn performer's body. Despite the influencer presumably playing no role in the video's production, it was viewed more than 8,200 times and captured the attention of other deepfake fans. What program did you use for creating the deepfake??" one user going by the name balascool commented. D'Amelio's agent did not reply to a request for comment. The video's creator, "DeepWorld23," has claimed in the comments that the program was a deepfake model hosted on developer platform GitHub.

For the second time in just a few years, South Korean women took to the streets of Seoul to demand an end to sexual abuse. When the country spearheaded Asia's #MeToo movement, the culprit was molka – spy cams used to record women without their knowledge. Now their fury was directed at an epidemic of deepfake pornography. For Juhee Jin, 26, a Seoul resident who advocates for women's rights, the emergence of this new menace, in which women and girls are again the targets, was depressingly predictable. "This should have been addressed a long time ago," says Jin, a translator.

Google has updated its Inappropriate Content Policy to include language that expressly prohibits advertisers from promoting websites and services that generate deepfake pornography. While the company already has strong restrictions in place for ads that feature certain types of sexual content, this update leaves no doubt that promoting "synthetic content that has been altered or generated to be sexually explicit or contain nudity" is in violation of its rules. Any advertiser promoting sites or apps that generate deepfake porn, that show instructions on how to create deepfake porn and that endorse or compare various deepfake porn services will be suspended without warning. They will no longer be able to publish their ads on Google, as well. The company will start implementing this rule on May 30 and is giving advertisers the chance to remove any ad in violation of the new policy.

Maria Giulia Marongiu, Ms Meloni's lawyer, said the sum was "symbolic" and the demand for compensation was meant to "send a message to women who are victims of this kind of abuse of power not to be afraid to press charges."

Whether through the frowning high-definition face of a chimpanzee or a psychedelic, pink-and-red-hued doppelganger of himself, Reuven Cohen uses AI-generated images to catch people's attention. "I've always been interested in art and design and video and enjoy pushing boundaries," he says--but the Toronto-based consultant, who helps companies develop AI tools, also hopes to raise awareness of the technology's darker uses. "It can also be specifically trained to be quite gruesome and bad in a whole variety of ways," Cohen says. He's a fan of the freewheeling experimentation that has been unleashed by open source image-generation technology. But that same freedom enables the creation of explicit images of women used for harassment.

These initiatives are a great start and raise public awareness--but the devil will be in the details. Existing rules in the UK and some US states already ban the creation and/or dissemination of deepfakes. The FTC would make it illegal for AI platforms to create content that impersonates people and would allow the agency to force scammers to return the money they made from such scams. But there is a big elephant in the room: outright bans might not even be technically feasible. There is no button someone can flick on and off, says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at the digital rights organization Access Now.