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AI incident: sexual content (Aug 2024)

2 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 5 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Synthetic media generation technology developers and Deepfake technology developers and deployed by Synthetic media creators, Operators of 16 deepfake pornography websites and 1 other allegedly harmed Women depicted in deepfake pornography, Women and girls and 8 others.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
Occurred
Coverage
2 reportsAug 2024 - Mar 2025

What happened

In August 2024, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against 16 websites accused of using generative AI to create and distribute nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes, including images of minors. The sites, which had over 200 million visits in six months, invited users to upload real images to generate explicit fakes. By March 2025, 11 of the targeted websites had shut down following legal pressure.

Editor's notes

Timeline notes: The San Francisco City Attorney's office announced its actions against the 16 operators of these sites on August 15, 2024 (the date for this incident ID). By March 2025, reporting on these actions stated that 11 of the sites had been taken down.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (2)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. City Attorney sues most-visited websites that create nonconsensual deepfake pornography
    sfcityattorney.org · Office of the City Attorney of San Francisco
  2. SF City Attorney's Office takes down websites spreading deepfake nudes
    nbcbayarea.com · Ginger Conejero Saab

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Women depicted in deepfake pornography Women and girls Women Victims of non-consensual deepfakes Victims of deepfake child abuse Victims of deepfake abuse Privacy Minors depicted in deepfake pornography Minors Girls

AI systems implicated

Synthetic media generation technologyDeepfake technology

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.3.

  • Cheating/plagiarism

    "Cheating/plagiarism - Use of another person’s or group’s words or ideas without consent and/or acknowledgement."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • IP/copyright loss

    "IP/copyright loss - Misuse or abuse of an individual or organisation’s intellectual property, including copyright, trademarks, and patents."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Financial and business

    "Financial and Business - Use or misuse of a technology system in a manner that damages the financial interests of an individual or group, or which causes strategic, operational, legal or financial harm to a business or...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Impersonation/identity theft

    "Impersonation/identity theft - Theft of an individual, group or organisation’s identity by a third-party in order to defraud, mock or otherwise harm them."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Dehumanisation/objectification

    "Dehumanisation/objectification - Use or misuse of a technology system to depict and/or treat people as not human, less than human, or as objects."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Defamation/libel/slander

    "Defamation/libel/slander - Use of a technology system to create, facilitate or amplify false perception(s) about an individual, group, or organisation."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Misinformation and Manipulation

    "Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be exploited to craft deceptive narratives with levels of persuasiveness similar to human-generated content (Pan et al., 2023b; Spitale et al., 2023), to fabri- cate fake n...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Cybersecurity

    "LLMs may exacerbate cybersecurity risks in various ways (Newman, 2024). Firstly, LLMs may significantly amplify the effectiveness of deceptive operations aimed at tricking people into disclosing sensitive information or...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Synthetic media creators

Source record: incident #1004 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports