Campaigners say women and girls often struggle to get intimate images removed once they are shared online. Campaigners say women and girls often struggle to get intimate images removed once they are shared online. Ofcom to update codes of practice amid rise in'revenge porn' and AI-generated deepfakes targeting women and girls Social media, messaging platforms and online forums that publish intimate image abuse - often intended to humiliate women and girls - are being instructed to follow new guidelines to stop it spreading. Ofcom said it would change its codes of practice to force service providers to detect and quash intimate image abuse - sometimes called "revenge porn" - and crack down on AI-generated deepfakes. A wave of deepfakes emerged in January when Elon Musk's Grok AI was widely used to create sexualised videos of women in bikinis.

Uta Frith seems remarkably cheerful and content for someone who's spent six decades trying and failing to get to grips with her life's obsession. "Very little has stood the test of time," she tells me as we sit down in her living room in a leafy estate in Harrow-on-the-Hill, London. Around us, high-ceilinged walls papered in a luxurious red print are barely visible between rammed bookshelves, several model brains and a collection of abstract art. Frith has been searching for the mechanisms that underpin the enigmatic condition of autism ever since she first met profoundly autistic children in the late 1960s. "We could identify them intuitively, but not really scientifically - and I have to say that this is, unfortunately, still the case." Still, Frith's influence on our ever-shifting understanding of autism has been monumental.

In a number of instances, investigation showed that while one Telegram channel had been shut down, another with a near-identical name remained active. In a number of instances, investigation showed that while one Telegram channel had been shut down, another with a near-identical name remained active. Millions of people around the world are creating and sharing deepfake nudes on the secure messaging app Telegram, a Guardian analysis has shown, as the spread of advanced AI tools industrialises the online abuse of women. The Guardian has identified at least 150 Telegram channels - large encrypted group chats popular for their secure communication - that appear to have users in many countries, from the UK to Brazil, China to Nigeria, Russia to India. Some of them offer "nudified" photos or videos for a fee: users can upload a photo of any woman, and AI will produce a video of that woman performing sexual acts.

In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he bought a new laptop and iPhone. He wanted to reduce the risk of having his personal devices confiscated, because he knew his work made him a prime target for surveillance. "I'm traveling under the assumption that I am being watched, right down to exactly where I am at any moment," Deibert says. Deibert directs the Citizen Lab, a research center he founded in 2001 to serve as "counterintelligence for civil society." Housed at the University of Toronto, it's one of the few institutions that investigate cyberthreats exclusively in the public interest, and in doing so, it has exposed some of the most egregious digital abuses of the past two decades.

A substantial number of AI images generated or edited with Grok are targeting women in religious and cultural clothing. Among the vast and growing library of nonconsensual sexualized edits that Grok has generated on request over the past week, many perpetrators have asked xAI's bot to put on or take off a hijab, a saree, a nun's habit, or another kind of modest religious or cultural type of clothing. In a review of 500 Grok images generated between January 6 and January 9, WIRED found around 5 percent of the output featured an image of a woman who was, as the result of prompts from users, either stripped from or made to wear religious or cultural clothing. Indian sarees and modest Islamic wear were the most common examples in the output, which also featured Japanese school uniforms, burqas, and early 20th century-style bathing suits with long sleeves. "Women of color have been disproportionately affected by manipulated, altered, and fabricated intimate images and videos prior to deepfakes and even with deepfakes, because of the way that society and particularly misogynistic men view women of color as less human and less worthy of dignity," says Noelle Martin, a lawyer and PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia researching the regulation of deepfake abuse.

An investigation by the UK advertising watchdog has found a number of shocking ads in mobile gaming apps that depict women as sexual objects, use pornographic tropes, and feature non-consensual sexual scenarios involving "violent and coercive control". The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) used avatars, which mimic the browsing behaviour of different gender and age groups, to monitor ads served when mobile games are open and identify breaches of the UK code. While most of the thousands of promotions served to the avatars complied with UK rules, the watchdog identified and banned eight that featured "shocking" content that portrayed women in a harmful way. Two ads promoting an artificial intelligence chatbot app, Linky: Chat With Characters AI, began with a woman dressed in a manga T-shirt, a short skirt and large bunny ears dancing in a bedroom with text reading: "Tell me which bf [boyfriend] I should break up with." The ad moved on to animated content featuring text conversations with three manga-style young men.

Sudanese paramilitaries have attacked the city of el-Fasher killing at least 38 people, according to local activists, while international rights groups accuse the fighters of widespread sexual violence. The local resistance committee, a volunteer group coordinating aid in el-Fasher, said on Sunday that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) targeted the centre of the capital of North Darfur state "with four high-explosive missiles". The massacre followed an earlier drone attack on the city's Saudi Hospital on Friday, which killed nine people and wounded 20, forcing doctors to halt operations. World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described attacks on healthcare facilities across Sudan as "deplorable" in a post on X on Saturday. The RSF and Sudan's army have been locked in a power struggle since mid-April 2023, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises, with tens of thousands killed and more than 11 million displaced.

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.

Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful "undress" websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be "nude" without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months. A WIRED analysis found 16 of the biggest so-called undress and "nudify" websites using the sign-in infrastructure from Google, Apple, Discord, Twitter, Patreon, and Line. This approach allows people to easily create accounts on the deepfake websites--offering them a veneer of credibility--before they pay for credits and generate images. While bots and websites that create nonconsensual intimate images of women and girls have existed for years, the number has increased with the introduction of generative AI.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced he intended to shut down 16 of the most popular AI "undressing" sites at a press conference on Thursday. The Verge reported that the City Attorney is accusing these sites of violating federal laws regarding revenge pornography, deepfake pornography and child pornography. Chiu's office also accused the sites of violating the state of California's unfair competition law because "the harm they cause to consumers greatly outweighs any benefits associated with those practices," according to the complaint for injunctive relief filed in a California superior court. The complaint focuses on a total of 50 defendants Chiu intends to prosecute for operating undressing websites. Some of the defendants' and websites' names were redacted but it also publicly identifies a few companies that operate "some of the world's most popular websites that offer to nudify images of women and girls" such as Sol Ecom located in Florida, Briver in New Mexico and the UK-based Itai Tech Ltd.