Around 104,852 women had their photos uploaded to a bot, on the WhatsApp-like text messaging app Telegram, which were then used to generate computer-generated fake nudes of them without their knowledge or consent, researchers revealed on Tuesday. The text messaging service Telegram was used to generate and share these fake nudes. These so-called "deepfake" images were created by an ecosystem of bots on the messaging app Telegram that could generate fake nudes on request, according to a report released by Sensity, an intelligence firm that specializes in deepfakes. The report found that users interacting with these bots were mainly creating fake nudes of women they know from images taken from social media, which is then shared and traded on other Telegram channels. The Telegram channels the researchers examined were made up of 101,080 members worldwide, with 70% coming from Russia and other eastern European countries.

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. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. 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.

Photos underage girls share on their social media accounts are being faked to appear nude and shared on messaging app Telegram, a new report discovered. The disturbing images are created using a simple'deepfake' bot that can virtually remove clothes using artificial intelligence, according to report authors Sensity. More than 100,000 non-consensual sexual images of 10,000 women and girls have been shared online that were created using the bot between July 2019 and 2020. The majority of the victims were private individuals with photos taken from social media - all were women and some looked'visibly underage', Sensity said. Sensity says what makes this bot particularly scary is how easy it is to use as it just requires the user to upload an image of a girl, click a few buttons and it then uses its'neural network' to determine what would be under the clothes and produce a nude This form of'deepfake porn' isn't new, the technology behind this bot is suspected to be based on an tool produced last year called DeepNude.

A computer tool led to the creation of thousands of fake nude photos of women -- some of them underage -- without their consent that were then uploaded to the messaging app Telegram, The Washington Post reported. Sensity, a visual threat intelligence company headquartered in Amsterdam, discovered the Telegram network. There are 101,080 members in the network, and 70% of the group resides in Russia or Europe. About 104,852 images derived from pictures of more than 680,000 women were posted publicly to the app, with 70% of the photos coming from social media or private sources. A small number of victims appeared to be underage.

Hundreds of explicit deepfake videos featuring female celebrities, actresses, and musicians are being uploaded to the world's biggest pornography websites every month, new analysis shows. The nonconsensual videos rack up millions of views, and porn companies are still failing to remove them from their websites. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Up to 1,000 deepfake videos have been uploaded to porn sites every month as they became increasingly popular during 2020, figures from deepfake detection company Sensity show. The videos continue to break away from dedicated deepfake pornography communities and into the mainstream.

Encountering altered videos and photoshopped images is almost a rite of passage on the internet. It's rare these days that you'd visit social media and not come across some form of edited content -- whether that be a simple selfie with a filter, a highly embellished meme or a video edited to add a soundtrack or enhance certain elements. But while some forms of media are obviously edited, other alterations may be harder to spot. You may have heard the term "deepfake" in recent years -- it first came about in 2017 to describe videos and images that implement deep learning algorithms to create videos and images that look real. For example, take the moon disaster speech given by former president Richard Nixon when the Apollo 11 team crashed into the lunar surface.

"We are already at the point where you can't tell the difference between deepfakes and the real thing," Professor Hao Li of the University of Southern California tells the BBC. We are at the computer scientist's deepfake installation at the World Economic Forum in Davos which gives a hint of what he means. Like other deepfake tools, his software creates computer-manipulated videos of people - often politicians or celebrities - that are designed to look real. Most often this involves "face swapping", whereby the face of a celebrity is overlaid onto the likeness of someone else. As I sit, a camera films my face and projects it onto a screen in front of me; my features are then digitally mapped.

You might not be aware of it, but there's a quiet arms race going on over our collective reality. The fight is between those who want to subvert it and usher in a world where we no longer believe what we see on our screens and those who want to help preserve the status quo. Up until this point in time, we have largely trusted our eyes and ears when consuming audio and visual media content, but new technological systems that create something known as deepfakes, are changing that. And as these deepfake videos nudge into the mainstream, experts are increasingly worried about the ramifications it will have on the information sharing that underpins society. Dr Richard Nock is the head of machine learning at CSIRO's Data 61 and understands the daunting potential of the technology that powers deepfake videos.

San Francisco (CNN)Deepfake videos are quickly becoming a problem, but there has been much debate about just how big the problem really is. One company is now trying to put a number on it. There are at least 14,678 deepfake videos -- and counting -- on the internet, according to a recent tally by a startup that builds technology to spot this kind of AI-manipulated content. And nearly all of them are porn. The number of deepfake videos is 84% higher than it was last December when Amsterdam-based Deeptrace found 7,964 deepfake videos during its first online count.

A perfect storm arising from the world of pornography may threaten the U.S. elections in 2020 with disruptive political scandals having nothing to do with actual affairs. Instead, face-swapping "deepfake" technology that first became popular on porn websites could eventually generate convincing fake videos of politicians saying or doing things that never happened in real life--a scenario that could sow widespread chaos if such videos are not flagged and debunked in time. The thankless task of debunking fake images and videos online has generally fallen upon news reporters, fact-checking websites and some sharp-eyed good Samaritans. But the more recent rise of AI-driven deepfakes that can turn Hollywood celebrities and politicians into digital puppets may require additional fact-checking help from AI-driven detection technologies. An Amsterdam-based startup called Deeptrace Labs aims to become one of the go-to shops for such deepfake detection technologies. "We see deepfakes and similar technologies as a new wave of cybersecurity threats, with the potential of affecting every digital audiovisual communication channel," says Giorgio Patrini, CEO and chief scientist at Deeptrace Labs, a startup based out of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.