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AI incident: sexual content (JanitorAI, Jan 2025)

2 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 5 Sep 2026
On this page 10 sections

In brief

An AI system built by Synthetic media generation technology developers, Synthetic image generation technology developers and 4 others and deployed by Synthetic media creators, James Florence Jr. and 1 other allegedly harmed Women and girls, Women and 7 others.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
Occurred
Coverage
2 reportsJan 2025 - Feb 2025

What happened

In January 2025, James Florence Jr. of Plymouth, MA, agreed to plead guilty to cyberstalking charges involving the alleged use of AI tools like CrushOn.ai and JanitorAI. The U.S. Attorney’s Office reports the harassment spanned 2014–2024, though AI-driven tactics reportedly began around 2017. Florence allegedly created deepfake pornographic images, programmed AI chatbots to impersonate victims, distributed doctored content, exposed personal information, and encouraged online harassment.

Laws on record for this risk area

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 instruments on record cover this risk area.

Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. 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. Plymouth Man Agrees to Plead Guilty to a Decade Long Cyberstalking Campaign Against Multiple Victims and Possession of Child Pornography
    justice.gov · United States Attorney's Office (District of Massachusetts)
  2. A man stalked a professor for six years. Then he used AI chatbots to lure strangers to her home
    theguardian.com · Katie McQue

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Women and girls Women Victims of non-consensual deepfakes Victims of deepfake abuse Six other women and a 17-year-old girl targeted by James Florence Jr. Privacy Families of victims targeted by James Florence Jr. Epistemic integrity Anonymous university professor targeted by James Florence Jr.

AI systems implicated

X (Twitter)RedditLinktreeladies.exposedJanitorAICrushOn.AICraigslistChatbots

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

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

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

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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)

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 #916 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports