AI Nudifiers continue to reach millions and make millions

This 3,600-word deep dive into the economics and infrastructure of the horrible AI nudifier industry is a joint effort with Santiago Lakatos, an investigative researcher who is the lead author on this piece.

Finalizing this story took days of work and got Indicator threatened with a lawsuit in the UAE. In my experience as a former Googler, it is the type of analysis that platforms commission from their teams or external experts. We are publishing it on Indicator thanks to our members.

— Alexios

Over the past two years, websites that use AI to turn any photo into a nude have been targeted by platform moderation, legal action, and regulation. While some AI nudifiers have been shut down, the ecosystem as a whole had adapted and proven remarkably resilient.

Just last week, a Save the Children survey of young people in Spain found that one in five respondents claim to have been targeted by a deepfake nude while still a minor. Statistics from the UK and the US show these toxic tools have a similar reach in those countries. Even a small fraction of these numbers would amount to hundreds of thousands of teenagers being “nudified” against their consent around the world.

We manually reviewed 85 websites that sell this type of image-based sexual abuse as a service to understand their business model, infrastructure, and marketing strategies. We also extracted data about them through several third-party platforms.

We used this information to produce a comprehensive analysis of the reach of the web-based AI nudifier ecosystem and what we believe to be the first estimate of their overall turnover.

In doing so, we also found that these noxious websites continue to benefit from access to mainstream infrastructure providers. Source code inspection suggests that Amazon and Cloudflare provide hosting or content delivery services for 62 of the 85 nudifiers in our sample. Google enabled simple sign-on for 53 out of 85. Either directly or through an intermediary called Luxury Fintech, some of these websites also leverage Coinbase, PayPal, Mercuryo, and Telegram to accept credit card payments from their customers.

We build on foundational research by Henry Ajder and others, excellent prior reporting by 404 Media, Bellingcat, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and Wired, as well as Indicator’s own work to sound yet again the alarm about this malignant outgrowth of the generative AI revolution.