Deepfake technology can turn anyone's likeness into convincing synthetic imagery or video using artificial intelligence. Home Security Heroes, a group that tries to prevent identity theft, reckons it takes less than 25 minutes to make a deepfake clip from a single clear headshot. A survey by the Alan Turing Institute, Britain's national institute for AI, found almost one-third of women and one-fifth of men worry about being targeted by deepfake pornography.
So-called nudify apps take images of clothed people and produce plausible nudes. Indicator, a publication focused on digital deception, tracked 85 nudify sites in the six months to May 2025 and found they received about 18.5m visits a month between them, earning as much as $36m in the year to May. The apps are troublingly popular among schoolyard bullies.
America's "Take It Down Act", championed by First Lady Melania Trump, bars people from knowingly publishing X-rated images of children or of adults online without their consent, whether real or machine-made. The European Union's AI Act requires synthetic content that looks authentic to be labelled. Denmark plans to give people copyright over their own likenesses. Britain will give AI developers and child-protection groups the power to test AI models to make sure they cannot be used to simulate child sexual abuse. Gabrielle Bertin, a British peer, petitioned the government to ban nudify apps outright.
Online scammers increasingly use deepfake porn to blackmail people or to win their confidence, preying on the vulnerability that comes with sexual desire.
A clever prophet makes sure of the event first.