Abusive, sexually explicit deepfakes have only become easier to make and more widespread in the last nine years. Since we first covered deepfakes when they appeared
in 2017
, they’ve never been the stuff of dark web sites or shadowy networks. They're found on social media networks, through basic web searches, and on easily downloadable apps and accessible forums.
The most prominent hosts of non-consensual, AI-generated imagery are supported by some of the biggest web infrastructure providers in the world, getting their hosting, email, advertising, and content management systems from these companies. A new study examines how providers like Cloudflare, Google, Proton, Namecheap, and WordPress help non-consensual imagery sites thrive. Despite years of knowledge about these wildly popular sites, big tech companies continue providing infrastructure services that prop up abuse imagery, even though their own terms of service often prohibit illegal and harmful content, the study claims.
Hany Farid, professor in Computer Science at Dartmouth College, Sophie Nightingale, a senior lecturer in psychology at Lancaster University, and Lancaster’s Sarah Morgan, who acts as the project coordinator on Nightingale’s “Protecting Ordinary People from Deepfake Harms” fellowship published their paper,
“The Backbone of Abuse: How Infrastructure Providers Enable the Proliferation of AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery”
in Stanford’s peer-reviewed
Journal of Online Trust and Safety
on Wednesday.
In a six-week period between February and March, they identified 400 URLs based on keyword searching and Google Alerts, then narrowed the sites down to 88 that were actively hosting non-consensual intimate imagery. Most of the content on these sites was of female celebrities, actresses, pop singers, K-pop idols, and women working in politics or activism. From there, they used open-source web-analysis tools like WHOIS to see what infrastructure providers the sites used.
“Five play
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