🤥 Faked Up #1

Undoing undressers, detecting deepfakes, and Katy Perry's mom

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This newsletter is a ~6-minute read and contains 55 links

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Top Stories

UNDOING UNDRESSERS

Google announced on May 1 that it would ban all ads for AI-generated porn, even if there is no nudity in the ad itself.

This is a welcome move. Still, there is plenty of work left to do.

Of particular concern are “undressers” or “nudifiers” — apps that take a real picture of a person wearing clothes and turn it into a nude. While deepfake porn generators can in principle have legitimate use cases, nudifiers are tools of harassment used to target high school girls in Brazil, Spain and at least two US states. Here’s how one of these website markets itself explicitly for non consensual purposes:

Nudifiers leverage a range of platforms for their operations. They use [cw: explicit content] Telegram for customer service and Twitter for marketing. They offer apps for Apple and Android and sign-in through Discord or Google.

And they reach millions through search engines. According to SimilarWeb, approximately 1 million of clothoff[.]io’s 4.4 million monthly visits originated from organic search. While it is expected behavior that searching for the name of a legal website returns a basic link to the website, undressers also trigger more immersive features that are typically verboten for harmful content.

Take Google’s result for [clothoff free coins], which highlights a coin giveaway in its new Search Generative Experience.