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Female Celebrities' Faces Reportedly Shown in Sexually Suggestive Ads for Deepfake App

5 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 14 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Synthetic video generation technology developers, Synthetic media generation technology developers and 2 others and deployed by Synthetic media creators, Facemega and 1 other allegedly harmed Women and girls, Women and 8 others.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
Occurred
Coverage
5 reportsMar 2023

What happened

Sexually suggestive videos featuring faces of female celebrities such as Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson were reportedly rolled out as ads on social media for an app allowing users to create deepfakes.

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 (5)

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

  1. Hundreds of sexual deepfake ads using Emma Watson’s face ran on Facebook and Instagram in the last two days
    nbcnews.com · Kat Tenbarge
  2. Why the Facemega deepfake app is a slippery slope
    thred.com · Jessica Byrne
  3. Disturbing App That Advertised Emma Watson Deepfake Was Removed From App Stores
    jezebel.com · Kylie Cheung
  4. Demand for deepfake pornography is exploding. We aren’t ready
    theguardian.com · Moira Donegan
  5. A face-swap app promoted sexually suggestive ads with Emma Watson's face. An attorney says this is how deepfake tech can be used as a 'weapon' against women.
    insider.com · Katie Balevic

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Women and girls Women Victims of non-consensual deepfakes Victims of deepfake abuse Scarlett Johansson Public figures Privacy Epistemic integrity Emma Watson Celebrities

AI systems implicated

Synthetic video generation technologySynthetic media generation technologyFacemegaDeepfake 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 #494 on the AI Incident Database · all 5 reports