AI incident ·
AI incident: sexual content (Oct 2023)
In brief
An AI system built by Synthetic media generation technology developers, Synthetic image generation technology developers and 2 others and deployed by Unnamed male students at Westfield High School, Synthetic media creators and 4 others allegedly harmed Women and girls, Victims of deepfake abuse and 7 others.
- Risk domain
- Malicious Actors & Misuse
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 57 reports
What happened
In October 2023, alleged deepfake nude images of female students were created and shared at Westfield High School in New Jersey. One alleged implicated system in this incident is the Clothoff deepfake app. A victim, Francesca Mani, and her mother, Dorota, began advocating for stronger laws after the school’s response reportedly left perpetrators unaccountable. Since the incident, their advocacy has drawn national attention, leading to trips to Washington, D.C., and bipartisan backing for legisla
Editor's notes
See also: Incident 799: Aledo High School Student Generates and Distributes Deepfake Nudes of Seven Female Classmates. This incident is similar in both its timing and its role in driving advocacy against the misuse of deepfake technology for nonconsensual abuse.
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.
- India DPDP Act
- Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
- EU AI Act
- Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA)
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 (57)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Unnamed male students at Westfield High School Synthetic media creators Men and boys Deepfake creators Boys Adolescent boys
- Alleged developer
- Synthetic media generation technology developers Synthetic image generation technology developers Developers of Clothoff Deepfake technology developers
- Alleged harmed party
- Women and girls Victims of deepfake abuse Unnamed female students at Westfield High School Privacy Girls Francesca Mani Epistemic integrity Educational communities Adolescent girls
AI systems implicated
Synthetic media generation technologySynthetic image generation technologyDeepfake technologyClothoffAI nudification tools
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Malicious Actors & Misuse
- Risk subdomain
- 4.3 Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
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."
- IP/copyright loss
"IP/copyright loss - Misuse or abuse of an individual or organisation’s intellectual property, including copyright, trademarks, and patents."
- 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...
- 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."
- 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."
- 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."
- 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...
- 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...
Related incidents
Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- Italian Mediaset Journalist Safiria Leccese's Image Was Reportedly Used in a Purportedly AI-Generated Fake Loan Scam
- Scammers Reportedly Used AI-Cloned Daughter's Voice to Defraud Bay Area Mother in Fake Kidnapping Call
- Guelph, Ontario, Woman Reportedly Lost $14,000 in Purported Deepfake MrBeast Cryptocurrency Scam
- Purportedly AI-Recreated Clips from Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage' Video Reportedly Appeared in FBI Promotional Video Posted by Kash Patel
- Ahmedabad Aadhaar Fraud Racket Reportedly Used Purportedly AI-Generated Deepfakes to Change Businessman's Linked Mobile Number
- ChatGPT Was Reportedly Consulted on Body-Disposal and Concealment Questions Before and After University of South Florida Doctoral Students Were Killed
Source record: incident #597 on the AI Incident Database · all 57 reports