AI driving ‘explosion’ of fake nudes as victims say the law is failing them
Campaigners are warning the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create realistic but fake nude images of real women is becoming “normalised”.
It’s also an increasing concern in schools. A recent survey by Internet Matters found 13% of teenagers have had an experience with nude deepfakes, while the NSPCC told Sky News “a new harm is developing”.
Ofcom will later this month introduce codes of practice for internet companies to clamp down on the illegal distribution of fake nudes, but Sky News has met two victims of this relatively new trend, who say the law needs to go further.
Earlier this year, social media influencer and former Love Island contestant, Cally Jane Beech, 33, was horrified when she discovered someone had used AI to turn an underwear brand photograph of her into a nude and it was being shared online.
The original image had been uploaded to a site that uses software to digitally transform a clothed picture into a naked picture.
Cally Jane Beech says she was horrified after a photo of her was turned into a nude and shared online
She told Sky News: “It looked so realistic, like nobody but me would know. It was like looking at me, but also not me.”
She added: “There shouldn’t be such a thing. It’s not a colouring book. It’s not a bit of fun. It’s people’s identity and stripping their clothes off.”
When Cally reported what had happened to the police, she struggled to get them to treat it as a crime.
“They didn’t really know what they could do about it, and because the site that hosted the image was global, they said that it’s out of their jurisdiction,” she said.
In November, Assistant Chief Constable Samantha Miller, of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, addressed a committee of MPs on the issue and concluded “the system is failing”, with a lack of capacity and inconsistency of practice across forces.
ACC Miller told the women and equalities committee she’d recently spoken to a campaigner who was in contact with 450 victims and “only two of them had a positive experience of policing”.
The government says new legislation outlawing the generation of AI nudes is coming next year, although it is already illegal to make fake nudes of minors.
Meanwhile, the problem is growing with multiple apps available for the purpose of unclothing people in photographs. Anyone can become a victim, although it is nearly always women.
Professor Clare McGlynn, an expert in online harms, said: “We’ve seen an exponential rise in the use of sexually explicit deepfakes. For example, one of the largest, most notorious websites dedicated to this abuse receives about 14 million hits a month.
“These nudify apps are easy to get from the app store, they’re advertised on Tik Tok, So, of course, young people are downloading them and using them. We’ve normalised the use of these nudify apps.”
‘Betrayed by my best friend’
Sky News spoke to “Jodie” (not her real name) from Cambridge who was tipped off by an anonymous email that she appeared to be in sex videos on a pornographic website.
“The images that I posted on Instagram and Facebook, which were fully clothed, were manipulated and turned into sexually explicit material,” she said.
Alex Woolf avoided jail and was told to pay £100 to each of his 15 victims
Jodie began to suspect someone she knew was posting pictures and encouraging people online to manipulate them.
Then she found a particular photograph, taken outside King’s College in Cambridge, that only one person had.
It was her best friend, Alex Woolf. She had airdropped the picture to him alone.
Woolf, who once won BBC young composer of the year, was later convicted of offences against 15 women, mostly because of Jodie’s perseverance and detective work.
Even then, his conviction only related to the offensive comments attached to the images, because while it’s illegal to share images – it’s not a crime to ask others to create them.
Jodie identified Woolf as he was the only one she’d sent this photo to
He was given a suspended sentence and ordered to pay £100 to each of his victims.
Jodie believes it’s imperative new laws are introduced to outlaw making and soliciting these types of images.
“My abuse is not your fun,” she said.
“Online abuse has the same effect psychologically that physical abuse does. I became suicidal, I wasn’t able to trust those closest to me because I had been betrayed by my best friend. And the effect of that on a person is monumental.”
‘A scary, lonely place’
A survey in October by Teacher Tap found 7% of teachers answered yes to the question: “In the last 12 months, have you had an incident of a student using technology to create a fake sexually graphic image of a classmate?”
In their campaigning both Cally and Jodie have come across examples of schoolgirls being deep faked.
Cally said: “It is used as a form of bullying because they think it’s funny. But it can have such a mental toll, and it must be a very scary and lonely place for a young girl to be dealing with that.”
Read more from Sky News:
Paedophile who made AI abuse images jailed for 18 years
Google’s AI chatbot Gemini tells user to ‘please die‘
Sex offenders using virtual reality to abuse children
The NSPCC said it has had calls about nude deepfakes to its helpline.
The charity’s policy manager for child safety online, Rani Govender, said the pictures can be used as “part of a grooming process” or as a form of blackmail, as well as being passed around by classmates “as a form of bullying and harassment”.
“Children become scared, isolated and they worry they won’t be believed that the images are created by someone else,” Ms Govender said.
She added: “This is a new harm, and it is developing, and it will require new measures from the government with child protection as a priority.”
Alex Davies-Jones, under-secretary of state for victims, told MPs in November: “We’ve committed to making an offence of creating a deepfake illegal and we will be legislating for that this session.”
For campaigners like Jodie and Cally the new laws can’t come soon enough. However, they worry they won’t have strong enough clauses around banning the soliciting of content and ensuring images are removed once they’ve been discovered.
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK.
In 2019, nine men were jailed for raping and abusing two teenage girls living in a children’s home in Bradford.
One of the victims, Fiona Goddard, says more than 50 men raped her.
When the government began to talk about offering councils money for local inquiries, Fiona hoped Bradford would be one of the first to take up the offer. But there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm.
The council was quick to point out that there had already been an independent case review into Fiona’s case, along with four other victims.
This, then, was Fiona’s first reasoning for wanting a national inquiry: The council felt it had done all that needed to be done. Fiona didn’t.
The Independent review, published in July 2021, found that while in the children’s home, Fiona “went missing almost on a daily basis”. The police attitude was that she could look after herself – she was “street-wise”.
There was “agreement by all agencies that Fiona was either at risk of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) or actively being sexually abused and exploited”. But “this was not addressed by any single agency”.
And “when Fiona became pregnant at the age of 15, there was little curiosity or enquiry who the father was”.
So, obvious failings were discovered.
The predictable response was that lessons had been learned and new processes put in place. But no one seemed to be held accountable.
Grooming gangs timeline: What happened, what inquiries there were and how Starmer was involved
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Grooming gangs: What happened?
Ms Goddard told Sky News: “In my serious case review she [Jane Booth, the independent chair] found seven incidences at least, in them records that she found, of them not reporting sexual abuse or rape or assault, from as young as eight years old, and one of the incidences I literally turned up covered in blood and they didn’t report it.
“That is not just misunderstanding a crime, that is making intentional decisions not to report the sexual abuse of a child.”
She adds: “Let’s not forget, these people still work within social services and the police force.”
Not only did this Independent review not satisfy Fiona, but it also didn’t begin to reflect the levels and scale of abuse Fiona had experienced outside of Bradford.
‘I literally turned up covered in blood and they didn’t report it,’ Fiona says
Asked where she was trafficked to, Fiona rattles off a list of cities.
“Blackburn, Rotherham, Rochdale, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Oldham – never Telford, I’d never even heard of Telford until it all came out if I’m honest – Nottingham, Oxford.”
Then she remembers she didn’t go to Oxford – men from Oxford came to her – but the point is made.
Local enquiries can’t possibly begin to explore the networks of men who traffic women, often down routes of drug trafficking being done by the same gangs.
Bradford Council told Sky News it contributed to the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and published more than 70 reports where child sexual exploitation was discussed and has implemented findings from the independent local review which included Fiona’s case.
Fiona believes there are numerous connections leading back to Bradford – but victims from each city often believe their abusers are at the centre of it.
We’ve spoken to grooming victims across the country, and in 2022, a case was reopened in Humberside after a Sky News investigation, where we found diary entries, texts, photos, and school reports all indicating that teenage victims had been abused.
Read more on this story:
Telford child abuse victims speak out
What we know about grooming gangs, from the data
The women who blew whistle on Rotherham
One of them was “Anna”, who also wants a national inquiry. She believes there is a national pattern of police forces not believing victims or even criminalising them instead.
Obtaining her own police records using a Subject Access Request (SAR), Anna found officers’ attitudes towards her were similar to what we heard with Fiona in Bradford, blaming her abuse and injuries on “lifestyle choices of her own”.
Anna said: “Every time I look at my Subject Access Request, I still think it’s shocking.
“It was the same sort of terminology – lifestyle choices, liar, attention seeker, and the majority of it was negative.
“It was really rare that I’d come across something where they were actually listening or they were concerned.”
Humberside Police told us: “As the investigation is active, it is imperative we protect its integrity; as such are unable to comment on aspects of the investigation as this could impact or jeopardise any criminal or judicial proceedings.”
But it is years now since Anna first reported her abuse, and she believes the police have left it too late to gather evidence.
She told Sky News: “I think it’s either happening everywhere, or young people have been taken everywhere.
“I think the attitudes of the professionals, the police, social services, from what I’ve heard and seen, they seem very similar in every area.”
The government-commissioned rapid review by Baroness Casey is due to be published next week and is expected to call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
Like Anna and Fiona, many victims will welcome Sir Keir Starmer’s early response accepting the recommendation.
They will want the inquiry to probe into the operations of the perpetrators – who they are and how they are connected.
But they will also want clear accountability of the people and organisations who failed to act when they reported their abuse – and an understanding of why, so often, authorities fail to protect these vulnerable girls.
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