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Tag: deepfakes

  • The Biggest Deepfake Porn Website Is Now Blocked in the UK

    The Biggest Deepfake Porn Website Is Now Blocked in the UK

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    Two of the biggest deepfake pornography websites have now started blocking people trying to access them from the United Kingdom. The move comes days after the UK government announced plans for a new law that will make creating non-consensual deepfakes a criminal offense.

    Non-consensual deepfake pornography websites and apps that “strip” clothes off of photos have been growing at an alarming rate—causing untold harm to the thousands of women they are used to target.

    Clare McGlynn, a professor at Durham University’s Law School, says the move is a “hugely significant moment” in the fight against deepfake abuse. “This ends the easy access and the normalization of deepfake sexual abuse material,” McGlynn tells WIRED.

    Since deepfake technology first emerged in December 2017, it has consistently been used to create non-consensual sexual images of women—swapping their faces into pornographic videos or allowing new “nude” images to be generated. As the technology has improved and become easier to access, hundreds of websites and apps have been created. Most recently, school children have been caught creating nudes of classmates.

    The blocks on the deepfake websites in the UK were first spotted today, with two of the most prominent services displaying notices on their landing pages that they are no longer accessible to people visiting from the country. WIRED is not naming the two websites due to their enabling of abuse.

    One of the websites with the restriction in place is the biggest deepfake pornography website existing today. On its homepage, when visiting from the UK, it displays a message saying access is denied. “Due to laws or (upcoming) legislation in your country or state, we are unfortunately obligated to deny you access to this website,” the message says. It also shows the visitor’s IP address and country.

    The other website, which also has an app, displays a similar message. “Access to the service in your country is blocked,” it says, before hinting there may be ways to get around the geographic restriction. The websites do not appear to have any restrictions in place when visiting from the United States, although may also be restricted in other countries.

    It is not immediately clear why the sites have introduced the location blocks or whether they have done so in response to any legal orders or notices. Nor is it clear if the blocks are temporary. Messages sent to the websites, through email addresses and contact forms, went unanswered. The creators of the websites have not posted any public messages on the websites or their social media channels about the blocks.

    Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has the power to tackle action against harmful websites under the UK’s controversial sweeping online safety laws that came into force last year. However, these powers are not yet fully operational and it is consulting on them.

    It’s likely the restrictions may significantly limit the amount of people in the UK seeking out or trying to create deepfake sexual abuse content. Data from Similarweb, a digital intelligence company, shows the biggest of the two websites had 12 million global visitors last month, while the other website had 4 million visitors. In the UK, they had around 500,000 and 50,000 visitors, respectively.

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  • The Real-Time Deepfake Romance Scams Have Arrived

    The Real-Time Deepfake Romance Scams Have Arrived

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    The Yahoo Boys are experienced scammers—and they openly brag about it. Photos and videos of their conning and recruitment can be found all across social media, from Facebook to TikTok. However, the cybercriminals, who have links back to Nigerian prince email scams, are arguably their most open on Telegram.

    In groups containing thousands of members, Yahoo Boys organize and advertise their individual skills for a smorgasbord of scams. They’re skilled social manipulators, who can have long-lasting impacts on their victims. Business email compromise, crypto scams, and impersonation scams are all touted in hundreds of posts per day. Members claim to be selling photo and video editing skills and entire albums of explicit photographs that can be used to build a convincing persona. Fake IDs and legitimate-looking social media profiles are for sale. Scam “scripts” are free to download.

    “The Yahoo Boys have elements of organized crime and disorganized crime,” says Paul Raffile, an intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, who has investigated Yahoo Boys sextorting teenagers and driving them towards suicide. “They don’t have a leader, they don’t have a governance structure.” Rather, Raffile says, they organize in clusters and share advice and tips online. Telegram did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about Yahoo Boys’ channels, but the three channels no longer appear to be accessible.

    The digital con artists started using deepfakes as part of their romance scams around May 2022, says Maimon. “What folks were doing was just posting videos of themselves, changing their appearance, and then sending them to the victim—trying to lure them to talk to them,” he says. Since then, they’ve moved on.

    To create their videos, the Yahoo Boys are using a handful of different software and apps. WIRED is not naming the specific software, to limit people’s ability to copy the attacks. However, the tools they are using are often advertised for entertainment purposes, such as allowing people to swap their faces with celebrities or influencers.

    The Yahoo Boys’ live deepfake calls run in two different ways. In the first, shown above, the scammers use a setup of two phones and a face-swapping app. The scammer holds the phone they are calling their victim with—they’re mostly seen using Zoom, Maimon says, but it can work on any platform—and uses its rear camera to record the screen of a second phone. This second phone has its camera pointing at the scammer’s face and is running a face-swapping app. They often place the two phones on stands to ensure they don’t move and use ring lights to improve conditions for a real-time face-swap, the videos show.

    The second common tactic—shown below—uses a laptop instead of a phone. (WIRED has blurred real faces in both videos.) Here, the scammer uses a webcam to capture their face and software running on the laptop changes their appearance. Videos of the setup show scammers are able to see their own face alongside the altered deepfake, with just the manipulated image being displayed over the live video call.

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  • Celebrity Deepfake Porn Cases Will Be Investigated by Meta Oversight Board

    Celebrity Deepfake Porn Cases Will Be Investigated by Meta Oversight Board

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    As AI tools become increasingly sophisticated and accessible, so too has one of its worst applications: non-consensual deepfake pornography. While much of this content is hosted on dedicated sites, more and more it’s finding its way onto social platforms. Today, the Meta Oversight Board announced that it was taking on cases that could force the company to reckon with how it deals with deepfake porn.

    The board, which is an independent body that can issue both binding decisions and recommendations to Meta, will focus on two deepfake porn cases, both regarding celebrities who had their images altered to create explicit content. In one case about an unnamed American celebrity, deepfake porn depicting the celebrity was removed from Facebook after it had already been flagged elsewhere on the platform. The post was also added to Meta’s Media Matching Service Bank, an automated system that finds and removes images that have already been flagged as violating Meta’s policies, to keep it off the platform.

    In the other case, a deepfake image of an unnamed Indian celebrity remained up on Instagram, even after users reported it for violating Meta’s policies on pornography. The deepfake of the Indian celebrity was removed once the board took up the case, according to the announcement.

    In both cases, the images were removed for violating Meta’s policies on bullying and harassment, and did not fall under Meta’s policies on porn. Meta, however, prohibits “content that depicts, threatens or promotes sexual violence, sexual assault or sexual exploitation” and does not allow porn or sexually explicit ads on its platforms. In a blog post released in tandem with the announcement of the cases, Meta said it removed the posts for violating the “derogatory sexualized photoshops or drawings” portion of its bullying and harassment policy, and that it also “determined that it violated [Meta’s] adult nudity and sexual activity policy.”

    The board hopes to use these cases to examine Meta’s policies and systems to detect and remove nonconsensual deepfake pornography, according to Julie Owono, an Oversight Board member. “I can tentatively already say that the main problem is probably detection,” she says. “Detection is not as perfect or at least is not as efficient as we would wish.”

    Meta has also long faced criticism for its approach to moderating content outside the US and Western Europe. For this case, the board already voiced concerns that the American celebrity and Indian celebrity received different treatment in response to their deepfakes appearing on the platform.

    “We know that Meta is quicker and more effective at moderating content in some markets and languages than others. By taking one case from the United States and one from India, we want to see if Meta is protecting all women globally in a fair way,” says Oversight Board cochair Helle Thorning-Schmidt. “It’s critical that this matter is addressed, and the board looks forward to exploring whether Meta’s policies and enforcement practices are effective at addressing this problem.”

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  • The Mayor of London Enters the Bullshit Cinematic Universe

    The Mayor of London Enters the Bullshit Cinematic Universe

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    Political violence is returning to the UK, bursting out of the morass of conspiracy and extremism online. There is at times a Blairish elusiveness to the way Khan talks—broadcastable sound bites, reversions to cliché, and a genial caution in the phrasing of his answers. But as we talk about the loss of the rational center, he leans in to interrupt. “Look, I was mates with Jo Cox,” he says. “She was one of my best friends.”

    In 2016, Cox—a Labour member of parliament for the northern constituency of Batley and Spen—was murdered by a white supremacist who subscribed to the Great Replacement theory. In 2021, Conservative MP David Amess was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist who had become radicalized online. “I’ve got a protection team. I live it every day, the consequences of this, the violence,” Khan says. “What I will not allow is to be cowed by those threats, because that’s what they want. They want for me to be scared.”

    Khan insists he’s an optimist. Despite the “hysteria” and the culture wars, he believes there’s still a middle ground where people can be persuaded with facts, where conflict can be resolved with discussion. Biden beat Trump in 2020, he points out; the moderate Emmanuel Macron saw off a far-right challenge from Marine Le Pen in France.

    On the other hand, the Islamophobic politician Geert Wilders is close to power in the Netherlands after winning the most votes in elections in November, running on a nativist, anti-immigration, climate-skeptic platform. Trump is ascendant again in the US, and the British government has made clear that it’s planning to fight a general election in 2024 by doubling down on hard-right policies.

    In fact, the UK government seemed to take inspiration from the ULEZ spin cycle. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced a list of “common sense” policies, which included rolling back a fictional “meat tax” and ruling out forcing households to divide their recycling into seven bins—something that had never been seriously under consideration. In September, Sunak announced he was “slamming the brakes on the war on motorists,” attacking speed limits and traffic reduction measures, before rolling back net-zero emissions targets, including delaying a planned phase-out of new diesel and petrol vehicle sales in the UK. In January, The Guardian reported that government ministers had cited 15-minute cities conspiracies around freedom of movement when making transport policy.

    Nervous of the backlash, Khan’s own Labour party, which is likely to defeat the Conservatives in a general election this year, shelved climate spending targets after distancing itself from the ULEZ policy. “The misinformation was accepted by all the parties except the Green Party, and so it became normalized,” Khan says. “My concern with addressing climate change, or addressing air pollution, or these sorts of green issues, is that politicians may be vacating the pitch because they’ve learned the wrong lessons.”

    It’s hard not to interpret this as a victory for bullshit. Populist politicians have co-opted the language of conspiracy—the Old Etonians and Oxbridge graduates who make up much of Britain’s ruling class now rail against elite control. In February, the former cabinet minister and Conservative Party grandee Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg gave a speech decrying the “international cabals and quangos telling hundreds of millions of people how to lead their lives.” Former prime minister Liz Truss shared a stage with Steve Bannon to attack the “deep state” that she claims brought her down after 44 disastrous days in office. Lee Anderson—a prominent Conservative MP and, until January, the party’s deputy chairperson—said in a TV interview that Islamists had “got control of Khan and got control of London.” Anderson was eventually suspended from the party.



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  • A Deepfake Nude Generator Reveals a Chilling Look at Its Victims

    A Deepfake Nude Generator Reveals a Chilling Look at Its Victims

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    Another image on the site showed a group of young teens who appear to be in middle school: a boy taking a selfie in what appears to be a school gymnasium with two girls, who smile and pose for the picture. The boy’s features were obscured by a Snapchat lens that enlarged his eyes so much that they covered his face.

    Captions on the apparently uploaded images indicated they include images of friends, classmates, and romantic partners. “My gf” one caption says, showing a young woman taking a selfie in a mirror.

    Many of the photos showed influencers who are popular on TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Other photos appeared to be Instagram screenshots of people sharing images from their everyday lives. One image showed a young woman smiling with a dessert topped with a celebratory candle.

    Several images appeared to show people who were complete strangers to the person who took the photo. One image taken from behind depicted a woman or girl who is not posing for a photo, but simply standing near what appears to be a tourist attraction.

    Some of the images in the feeds reviewed by WIRED were cropped to remove the faces of women and girls, showing only their chest or crotch.

    Huge Audience

    Over an eight-day period of monitoring the site, WIRED saw five new images of women appear on the Home feed, and three on the Explore page. Stats listed on the site showed that most of these images accumulated hundreds of “views.” It’s unclear if all images submitted to the site make it to the Home or Explore feed, or how views are tabulated. Every post on the Home feed has at least a few dozen views.

    Photos of celebrities and people with large Instagram followings top the list of “Most Viewed” images listed on the site. The most-viewed people of all time on the site are actor Jenna Ortega with more than 66,000 views, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift with more than 27,000 views, and an influencer and DJ from Malaysia with more than 26,000 views.

    Swift and Ortega have been targeted with deepfake nudes before. The circulation of fake nude images of Swift on X in January triggered a moment of renewed discussion about the impacts of deepfakes and the need for greater legal protections for victims. This month, NBC reported that, for seven months, Meta had hosted ads for a deepnude app. The app boasted about its ability to “undress” people, using a picture of Jenna Ortega from when she was 16 years old.

    In the US, no federal law targets the distribution of fake, nonconsensual nude images. A handful of states have enacted their own laws. But AI-generated nude images of minors come under the same category as other child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, says Jennifer Newman, executive director of the NCMEC’s Exploited Children’s Division.

    “If it is indistinguishable from an image of a live victim, of a real child, then that is child sexual abuse material to us,” Newman says. “And we will treat it as such as we’re processing our reports, as we’re getting these reports out to law enforcement.”

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  • Photography Is No Longer Evidence of Anything

    Photography Is No Longer Evidence of Anything

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    For weeks now, the world has been awash in conspiracy theories spurred by weird artifacts in a photographic image of the missing Princess of Wales that she eventually admitted had been edited. Some of them got pretty crazy, ranging from a cover-up of Kate’s alleged death, to a theory that the Royal Family were reptilian aliens. But none was as bizarre as the idea that in 2024 anyone might believe that a digital image is evidence of anything.

    Not only are digital images infinitely malleable, but the tools to manipulate them are as common as dirt. For anyone paying attention, this has been clear for decades. The issue was definitively laid out almost 40 years ago, in a piece cowritten by Kevin Kelly, a founding WIRED editor; Stewart Brand; and Jay Kinney in the July 1985 edition of The Whole Earth Review, a publication run out of Brand’s organization in Sausalito, California. Kelly had gotten the idea for the story a year or so earlier when he came across an internal newsletter for publisher Time Life, where his father worked. It described a million-dollar machine called Scitex, which created high-resolution digital images from photographic film, which could then be altered using a computer. High-end magazines were among the first customers: Kelly learned that National Geographic had used the tool to literally move one of the Pyramids of Giza so it could fit into a cover shot. “I thought, ‘Man, this is gonna change everything,’” says Kelly.

    The article was titled “Digital Retouching: The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything.” It opened with an imaginary courtroom scene where a lawyer argued that compromising photos should be excluded from a case, saying that due to its unreliability, “photography has no place in this or any other courtroom. For that matter, neither does film, videotape, or audiotape.”

    Did the article draw wide attention to the fact that photography might be stripped of its role as documentary proof, or the prospect of an era where no one can tell what’s real or fake? “No!” says Kelly. No one noticed. Even Kelly thought it would be many years before the tools to convincingly alter photos would become routinely available. Three years later, two brothers from Michigan invented what would become Photoshop, released as an Adobe product in 1990. The application put digital photo manipulation on desktop PCs, cutting the cost dramatically. By then even The New York Times was reporting on “the ethical issues involved in altering photographs and other materials using digital editing.”

    Adobe, in the eye of this storm for decades, has given a lot of thought to those issues. Ely Greenfield, CTO of Adobe’s digital media business, rightfully points out that long before Photoshop, film photographers and cinematographers used tricks to alter their images. But even though digital tools make the practice cheap and commonplace, Greenfield says, “treating photos and videos as documentary sources of truth is still a valuable thing. What is the purpose of an image? Is it there to look pretty? Is it there to tell a story? We all like looking at pretty images. But we think there’s still value in the storytelling.”

    To ascertain whether photographic storytelling is accurate or faked, Adobe and others have devised a tool set that strives for a degree of verifiability. Metadata in the Middleton photo, for instance, helped people ascertain that its anomalies were the result of a Photoshop edit, which the Princess owned up to. A consortium of over 2,500 creators, technologists, and publishers called the Content Authenticity Initiative, started by Adobe in 2019, is working to devise tools and standards so people can verify whether an image, video, or recording has been altered. It’s based on combining metadata with exotic watermarking and cryptographic techniques. Greenfield concedes, though, that those protections can be circumvented. “We have technologies that can detect edited photos or AI-generated photos, but it’s still a losing battle,” he says. “As long as there is a motivated enough actor who’s determined to overcome those technologies, they will.”



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  • Kids’ Cartoons Get a Free Pass From YouTube’s Deepfake Disclosure Rules

    Kids’ Cartoons Get a Free Pass From YouTube’s Deepfake Disclosure Rules

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    YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they’re seeing isn’t real. YouTube says it applies to “realistic” altered media such as “making it appear as if a real building caught fire” or swapping “the face of one individual with another’s.”

    The new policy shows YouTube taking steps that could help curb the spread of AI-generated misinformation as the US presidential election approaches. It is also striking for what it permits: AI-generated animations aimed at kids are not subject to the new synthetic content disclosure rules.

    YouTube’s new policies exclude animated content altogether from the disclosure requirement. This means that the emerging scene of get-rich-quick, AI-generated content hustlers can keep churning out videos aimed at children without having to disclose their methods. Parents concerned about the quality of hastily made nursery-rhyme videos will be left to identify AI-generated cartoons by themselves.

    YouTube’s new policy also says creators don’t need to flag use of AI for “minor” edits that are “primarily aesthetic” such as beauty filters or cleaning up video and audio. Use of AI to “generate or improve” a script or captions is also permitted without disclosure.

    There’s no shortage of low-quality content on YouTube made without AI, but generative AI tools lower the bar to producing video in a way that accelerates its production. YouTube’s parent company Google recently said it was tweaking its search algorithms to demote the recent flood of AI-generated clickbait, made possible by tools such as ChatGPT. Video generation technology is less mature but is improving fast.

    Established Problem

    YouTube is a children’s entertainment juggernaut, dwarfing competitors like Netflix and Disney. The platform has struggled in the past to moderate the vast quantity of content aimed at kids. It has come under fire for hosting content that looks superficially suitable or alluring to children but on closer viewing contains unsavory themes.

    WIRED recently reported on the rise of YouTube channels targeting children that appear to use AI video-generation tools to produce shoddy videos featuring generic 3D animations and off-kilter iterations of popular nursery rhymes.

    The exemption for animation in YouTube’s new policy could mean that parents cannot easily filter such videos out of search results or keep YouTube’s recommendation algorithm from autoplaying AI-generated cartoons after setting up their child to watch popular and thoroughly vetted channels like PBS Kids or Ms. Rachel.

    Some problematic AI-generated content aimed at kids does require flagging under the new rules. In 2023, the BBC investigated a wave of videos targeting older children that used AI tools to push pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, including climate change denialism. These videos imitated conventional live-action educational videos—showing, for example, the real pyramids of Giza—so unsuspecting viewers might mistake them for factually accurate educational content. (The pyramid videos then went on the suggest that the structures can generate electricity.) This new policy would crack down on that type of video.

    “We require kids content creators to disclose content that is meaningfully altered or synthetically generated when it seems realistic,” says YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez. “We don’t require disclosure of content that is clearly unrealistic and isn’t misleading the viewer into thinking it’s real.”

    The dedicated kids app YouTube Kids is curated using a combination of automated filters, human review, and user feedback to find well-made children’s content. But many parents simply use the main YouTube app to cue up content for their kids, relying on eyeballing video titles, listings, and thumbnail images to judge what is suitable.

    So far, most of the apparently AI-generated children’s content WIRED found on YouTube has been poorly made in similar ways to more conventional low-effort kids animations. They have ugly visuals, incoherent plots, and zero educational value—but are not uniquely ugly, incoherent, or pedagogically worthless.

    AI tools make it easier to produce such content, and in greater volume. Some of the channels WIRED found upload lengthy videos, some well over an hour long. Requiring labels on AI-generated kids content could help parents filter out cartoons that may have been published with minimal—or entirely without—human vetting.

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  • Combatting deepfakes is an evolutionary arms race

    Combatting deepfakes is an evolutionary arms race

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    Disinformation is far older than humans. Lessons from evolutionary biology can help defend against it today, says Jonathan R. Goodman

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  • Google Is Getting Thousands of Deepfake Porn Complaints

    Google Is Getting Thousands of Deepfake Porn Complaints

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    Each method is weaponized—almost always against women—to degrade, harass, or cause shame, among other harms. Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s e-safety commissioner, says her office is starting to see more deepfakes reported to its image-based abuse complaints scheme, alongside other AI-generated content, such as “synthetic” child sexual abuse and children using apps to create sexualized videos of their classmates. “We know it’s a really underreported form of abuse,” Grant says.

    As the number of videos on deepfake websites has grown, content creators—such as streamers and adult models—have used DMCA requests. The DMCA allows people who own the intellectual property of certain content to request it be removed from the websites directly or from search results. More than 8 billion takedown requests, covering everything from gaming to music, have been made to Google.

    “The DMCA historically has been an important way for victims of image-based sexual abuse to get their content removed from the internet,” says Carrie Goldberg, a victims’ rights attorney. Goldberg says newer criminal laws and civil law procedures make it easier to get some image-based sexual abuse removed, but deepfakes complicate the situation. “While platforms tend to have no empathy for victims of privacy violations, they do respect copyright laws,” Goldberg says.

    WIRED’s analysis of deepfake websites, which covered 14 sites, shows that Google has received DMCA takedown requests about all of them in the past few years. Many of the websites host only deepfake content and often focus on celebrities. The websites themselves include DMCA contact forms where people can directly request to have content removed, although they do not publish any statistics, and it is unclear how effective they are at responding to complaints. One website says it contains videos of “actresses, YouTubers, streamers, TV personas, and other types of public figures and celebrities.” It hosts hundreds of videos with “Taylor Swift” in the video title.

    The vast majority of DMCA takedown requests linked to deepfake websites listed in Google’s data relate to two of the biggest sites. Neither responded to written questions sent by WIRED. The majority of the 14 websites had over 80 percent of the complaints leading to content being removed by Google. Some copyright takedown requests sent by individuals indicate the distress the videos can have. “It is done to demean and bully me,” one request says. “I take this very seriously and I will do anything and everything to get it taken down,” another says.

    “It has such a huge impact on someone’s life,” says Yvette van Bekkum, the CEO of Orange Warriors, a firm that helps people remove leaked, stolen, or nonconsensually shared images online, including through DMCA requests. Van Bekkum says the organization is seeing an increase in deepfake content online, and victims face hurdles to come forward and ask that their content is removed. “Imagine going through a hiring process and people Google your name, and they find that kind of explicit content,” van Bekkum says.

    Google spokesperson Ned Adriance says its DMCA process allows “rights holders” to protect their work online and the company has separate tools for dealing with deepfakes—including a separate form and removal process. “We have policies for nonconsensual deepfake pornography, so people can have this type of content that includes their likeness removed from search results,” Adriance says. “And we’re actively developing additional safeguards to help people who are affected.” Google says when it receives a high volume of valid copyright removals about a website, it uses those as a signal the site may not be providing high-quality content. The company also says it has created a system to remove duplicates of nonconsensual deepfake porn once it has removed one copy of it, and that it has recently updated its search results to limit the visibility for deepfakes when people aren’t searching for them.

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  • Florida Middle Schoolers Arrested for Allegedly Creating Deepfake Nudes of Classmates

    Florida Middle Schoolers Arrested for Allegedly Creating Deepfake Nudes of Classmates

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    Two teenage boys from Miami, Florida, were arrested in December for allegedly creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of male and female classmates without consent, according to police reports obtained by WIRED via public record request.

    The arrest reports say the boys, aged 13 and 14, created the images of the students who were “between the ages of 12 and 13.”

    The Florida case appears to be the first arrests and criminal charges as a result of alleged sharing of AI-generated nude images to come to light. The boys were charged with third-degree felonies—the same level of crimes as grand theft auto or false imprisonment—under a state law passed in 2022 which makes it a felony to share “any altered sexual depiction” of a person without their consent.

    The parent of one of the boys arrested did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. The parent of the other boy said that he had “no comment.” The detective assigned to the case, and the state attorney handling the case, did not respond for comment in time for publication.

    As AI image-making tools have become more widely available, there have been several high-profile incidents in which minors allegedly created AI-generated nude images of classmates and shared them without consent. No arrests have been disclosed in the publicly reported cases—at Issaquah High School in Washington, Westfield High School in New Jersey, and Beverly Hills Vista Middle School in California—even though police reports were filed. At Issaquah High School, police opted not to press charges.

    The first media reports of the Florida case appeared in December, saying that the two boys were suspended from Pinecrest Cove Academy in Miami for 10 days after school administrators learned of allegations that they created and shared fake nude images without consent. After parents of the victims learned about the incident, several began publicly urging the school to expel the boys.

    Nadia Khan-Roberts, the mother of one of the victims, told NBC Miami in December that for all of the families whose children were victimized the incident was traumatizing. “Our daughters do not feel comfortable walking the same hallways with these boys,” she said. “It makes me feel violated, I feel taken advantage [of] and I feel used,” one victim, who asked to remain anonymous, told the TV station.

    WIRED obtained arrest records this week that say the incident was reported to police on December 6, 2023, and that the two boys were arrested on December 22. The records accuse the pair of using “an artificial intelligence application” to make the fake explicit images. The name of the app was not specified and the reports claim the boys shared the pictures between each other.

    “The incident was reported to a school administrator,” the reports say, without specifying who reported it, or how that person found out about the images. After the school administrator “obtained copies of the altered images” the administrator interviewed the victims depicted in them, the reports say, who said that they did not consent to the images being created.

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