Scott (00:00)
I’m a little nervous.

Elisabeth (00:03)
For what?

Scott (00:04)
I like to focus on nice things. Uhhuh. I saw a good cloud yesterday. No, it’s fine. We have other things to do probably. I like working outside in the evening, and the light changes and it’s beautiful.

Elisabeth (00:09)
Do you want tell me about it?

And you don’t think this is gonna be one of those beautiful conversations? huh.

Elisabeth (00:26)
Right. Buckled set. Okay, great. Cause I want to start by showing you a couple of real pictures, I guess. They’re screenshots that I found on Instagram, so do you want to look at this? And then for our listeners who cannot see what it is that you’re reading, can you read it for them?

Scott (00:28)
Buckle up. Let’s go.

I gotta read. Yes.

This one says “Mia isn’t real, she’s AI. I created her in less than forty-eight minutes on my laptop, but she’s been paying all my bills ever since.

Elisabeth (01:04)
And then scroll down just a little bit, and you’ll see another one that I’ll have you read as well.

Scott (01:08)
Yep. It says, “This model gets millions a year from subs, and you think this AI clone can’t get ten thousand subs paying ten dollars for content per month?”

And it’s what I assume is the real model up top and AI at the bottom.

Elisabeth (01:24)
The point of it was that there’s a real person in that picture, or they had taken a real person. Yeah. And then created an AI clone that does the same thing and looks like her.

So what’s your reaction just those two? Yes, just those two. What’s your reaction after seeing those thoughts, et cetera? Anything that comes to mind?

Scott (01:45)
I mean, it’s it’s weird. AI’s weird. But it just means like porn’s gonna be even more everywhere because

You can make so much more of it that’s not being real, that you don’t have to convince or coerce, or like people don’t have to actually make the decision to create that. It’s, you can just tell a computer to create that, you know, however many times over.

Elisabeth (02:13)
Yeah, it’s wild, huh? And to clarify for viewers, listeners, et cetera, these again, so AI models or AI clones, people who have used artificial intelligence to create an image of a woman that they could then use to sell explicit content on platforms like OnlyFans, or similar things like that online.

I first noticed this trend, actually, last summer. I just organically, on our Fight the New Drug page, had seen reels like this of people saying, “I make so much money with my OnlyFans model that’s not real.” And I thought it was so interesting. And we ended up doing video, like we had filmed a video of that, and I had done a bunch of research.

Cause I thought it was a weird trend that I was seeing, and nobody was talking about it. There were no news articles, there was no research, nothing online about it. But since that video, since I had posted that video a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, it’s crazy how this has escalated even more from just like what I showed you to what we’re really gonna get into here. It gets worse.

Scott (03:30)
What we’re really gonna get into? Okay.

Elisabeth (03:32)
Yeah, that was just the precursor. Brace yourself. Yeah.

I want to share just a current event that happened very recently, I believe in the last month or two.

Scott (03:42)
I’m like holding my breath.

Elisabeth (03:43)
Yeah, a little bit. I’m sorry. Okay. It’s gonna be it’s gonna be good to know. Okay. Yeah. So three women just filed a lawsuit against fifty-three men.

So these men allegedly searched the internet for unsuspecting young women. Then they used AI to create nearly identical explicit versions of them to sell pornographic content on subscription platforms like OnlyFans. This content allegedly generated millions of views and more than fifty thousand dollars in income in a single month. Now that is just the first part of this that’s if you’re looking at one of those pictures of an iceberg, this is just like the little tip and there’s a whole bunch underneath. So just knowing that part, the initial part of this case, what is your initial reaction there?

Scott (04:35)
Yeah, people post everything online now. There’s so much source material for that. Like, I don’t wanna be like, everybody should be worried. You’re posting everything online, but

Elisabeth (04:49)
That is a good point. Like it used to be something where if you were in the public eye, you had to worry about that. But now like they were searching for unsuspecting young women who some kind of presence on social media. And isn’t that everybody?

Scott (05:04)
It’s yeah, so many people. Yeah.

Elisabeth (05:06)
So the first part was, yeah, just essentially that these women had their images stolen to then create deepfake porn of them, which was sold and had lots of views, made lots of money for these men who did it.

The second half of this problem that is very interesting, is that these deepfakes were then used to advertise a series of courses teaching thousands of other men to do the same. So, going back to those initial images that I had you read and look at, so it was not only normalizing and advertising pornographic content, but it was also saying, “Hey, look, I built this thing in this one. So it’s 48 minutes. And she’s been paying my bills ever since. Why wouldn’t you do the same thing? I can show you to do the same thing. I’ve got a course in my bio. You click on that, you give me however much money, and I’ll teach you exactly how to do the same for yourself. You can achieve financial freedom. You can have all this great lifestyle that I’m promoting on my page, and you don’t even have to do any work for it essentially.”

And I think the fact that there’s such a demand on, like, looking at the salespeople, I guess, so to speak, the people who are selling these courses, that there’s such a demand on the opposite end. You know, I scrolled through a couple of these accounts, they have thousands of people in the comments saying, “Yep, send me the course. I want to learn about it.” Thousands. and the videos that they’re posting to advertise this get hundreds of thousands of views.

So there’s a demand on the opposite side where people are saying, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I’m in. I want to do this myself or contribute to this.” You know, whether or not they realize how destructive or how harmful that is, you know, it’s like, is there a gap between their understanding that this is exploitative or do they not care, like it’s interesting. But either way, like there are people who want to pay money to learn how to do this. Which is interesting. Yeah.

Scott (07:19)
I guess that’s where it comes back to the, like, objectification. Like, I had a conversation with somebody about this the other day. They didn’t like that word. I’m like, yeah, they’re not thinking about them like people that would have a reaction to their images being taken. Like that’s the that’s where you can clearly see the idea of objectification happening, that just zero consideration for their humanity.

Elisabeth (07:53)
When it’s like you are a product that I am then going to sell for a profit from.

Scott (07:58)
Yep. Mm-hmm.

Elisabeth (08:01)
So the last bit of this. Yeah, go ahead.

Scott (08:06)
Okay, this is maybe

But so this type of image is not legal to post…

Elisabeth (08:14)
Correct.

So the Take It Down Act makes it a federal crime to knowingly publish or threaten to publish non-consensual intimate imagery, which does include AI-generated deepfakes. So in this case, this is something where if you know one of these women found an Instagram account that had been selling images of them, they can report it to Instagram. Instagram is required to remove it within 48 hours as long as the claims are accurate.

And that is, yeah, not legal for them to publish on their account. And yeah.

Scott (08:51)
Yeah. But you can sell the courses teaching people how to make it.

Elisabeth (08:57)
Yeah, well, and that’s why it gets tricky is because this is so this is an ongoing lawsuit. You know, it’s not just a report that was made, and this is what you know, they’re reporting on this thing that’s happening. It’s like these people are, fifty-three men are in a lawsuit because what they did was illegal, and yet—

Scott (09:17)
Like a lawsuit, not criminally charged. It’s not…that’s the thing that…that’s like the weird new tech, it takes a while for regulation to catch up with new technology, and so it’s we’re at this weird spot where it’s illegal to post them. But in terms of creating them, or teaching other people how to create them, that seems right now, at least, there’s nothing saying that that’s explicitly illegal as far as far as what I understand. That seems crazy.

Elisabeth (09:51)
Yeah. And I think another element to this as well is how these women were being selected. I’ll tell you a little bit about that. So like I said, the initial men had used these women’s images to advertise a course teaching other men to do the same as we talked about.

So this course instructs users to scrape images from women’s social media accounts to feed into generative AI models and apps that would remove the women’s clothes and generate sexually explicit images and videos. And according to the lawsuit, the defendants encouraged their subscribers to target women with fewer than 50,000 followers. Do you wanna take a guess as to why that is?

Scott (10:38)
I would assume…I feel like I have two thoughts. One is like, less followers means one of your followers is less likely to see it and alert you to that. Or that you have maybe less, I don’t know, clout or pull when you try and request that the platform that it’s on get taken down. Like, if you’re a big deal, you’re probably, I don’t know, bigger influencers are probably more valuable to driving views and then ultimately ads from these other different platforms. And so they would rather keep the influencer and not the…I don’t know. Yeah. That seems crazy.

Elisabeth (11:19)
No, those are really great guesses and exactly right. It was to quote, avoid legal issues. So they were intentionally targeting women who weren’t in the public eye as much, didn’t have access to as many resources, maybe didn’t have as much, you know, money, to be able to have a lawsuit. So specifically targeting women that they felt they could get away with exploiting.

Scott (11:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Elisabeth (11:49)
And so it’s like what you said earlier, it’s scary, not that anybody should be exploited. Nobody should have to deal with this, whether you are putting yourself in the public eye or not. But it is really scary that this can just happen to literally anyone.

Scott (12:04)
It’s crazy, yeah. Yeah. Like I don’t wanna be fear-monger-y, but like could be happening and you don’t know it.

Elisabeth (12:12)
I mean, I’ve thought about that. Like I worry about that sometimes. And it’s like, how would you know? And then what would you do about it?

Scott (12:20)
Yep. I don’t know.

Elisabeth (12:23)
I guess what would you say…there are a lot of people, like every time we post something related to AI deepfakes, or we have a conversation about it, the response from a lot of people is that content isn’t real, so it shouldn’t impact you. It doesn’t really matter. You know, if you know it’s not real, like everybody else knows it’s not real, too. So, like it doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t affect you.

What is your response to people who have that assumption that it’s not harmful or it shouldn’t impact you?

Scott (12:59)
I think if you could be that stoic and believe that that’s true, like good for you. But, I don’t…I think that’s maybe like idealizing a response when it’s not happening to you.

Mentally, I guess it takes me back to being in school and like the way people fought against like rumors about them. Like, not images showing them doing things, but just like whether it was rumors or just like different versions of the same story, and how people get so upset about just words.

Elisabeth (13:40)
And even if people know that they’re not true and still spread it because it’s funny or because—

Scott (13:46)
Yes. It gets them a little bit of attention to be sharing that thing.

People still fight so much against those things that…these are not just kind of arbitrary thoughts or rumors or whatever. These are real images that people are watching, and I would say probably most of the time believing are real. Maybe they don’t, but it doesn’t make it any less, I don’t know, what, violating, hurtful? Just like, yeah, to be misrepresented.

Like we want to be known and understood by the people around us that we care about. And then just to be largely misrepresented like that, which feels like such a vanilla way of classifying this. That’s like way too much of an understatement.

Elisabeth (14:17)
Yeah. Rough.

Scott (14:43)
That is, I think, how I would draw the parallel of like, no, you don’t actually, you wouldn’t actually think that if it was you. And also, I think people are probably thinking about…people are probably only thinking about it as like sexual content or like something maybe they see as desirable, like to be desirable. But it’s not just sex or sexualized content or whatever. It’s like humiliating and violating.

When that’s not who you

Elisabeth (15:23)
Right. It’s easy to say if it hasn’t happened to you. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott (15:26)
Or it’s maybe that like…I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna like go too far with assumptions, but like if people are saying that that are more okay with porn, then maybe they are not seeing it as something that they feel would be as like humiliating as it would feel if you saw that of you.

Elisabeth (15:49)
Yeah.

Scott (15:51)
Okay, so like what if…it’s really the only like parallel is like, okay, so like w what would be the humiliating thing for you that could make you understand it? Like there were just videos of you.

Elisabeth (16:05)
I think that’s a really interesting point, actually, because we especially when we deal with trafficking victims or people who have been in that realm and been exploited in that way. We always, always, always get people who say, “Well, there’s worse things in life than sex. And if that’s the worst thing that happened to you, that’s okay. Just move on.” But it’s so dismissive.

Scott (16:35)
So then they’re just classifying it as like sex, not thinking about it as violence.

Elisabeth (16:39)
Yeah, that has then been viewed by millions of people and profited from, and yeah, and so and that’s interesting. I hadn’t made the connection of that with AI and the deepfake world, but I do think there’s some truth to that, where, yeah, like maybe from your perspective, there’s worse things than being depicted as having sex. You know, at least people think you’re having sex. At least people think you’re having a sex life. That’s great. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s, you know, the harm and the experience that the victims are having is fearful. And that’s something they’re gonna be worried about the rest of their life.

What if an employer sees it? What if my grandma comes across it? What if someone at my church sees it? Always looking over your shoulder for that. The humiliation of having people, yeah, watching you not you, but the likeness of you doing things that you would never do on camera.

Scott (17:40)
Right. Does it matter if it’s I mean, I know you can know that that wasn’t you, but the fact that people are watching it thinking it’s you or…

Elisabeth (17:52)
Yeah. And this specific, again, going kind of back to this one specific case, there were over half a million AI deepfakes created of these non-consenting and unsuspecting women. So half a million images, which is an insane number. Yeah. And I think…

Scott (18:10)
Crazy amount.

Elisabeth (18:13)
It’s easy to say, well, we all, you know, you can tell when something’s AI-generated because a year ago, AI couldn’t make fingers look right. You know?

And images like AI just keeps getting better and better and better. So it’s easy to say, you would know if it was fake, but I see stuff all the time now where I’m like Is that AI? I can’t tell.

Scott (18:34)
People that think they know, think they know. And at the same time, it fools so many people.

Elisabeth (18:40)
Yep. And not just your mother-in-law anymore, fools like you. So yeah, this is a huge problem. And I think this is just the first case of this kind. I would imagine that there’s more and more. And to your point, lots of people who have probably had this happen to them and just wouldn’t know and are never gonna know. So kind of on a more hopeful note…

Scott (19:08)
Yeah. That sounds promising. More hopeful.

Elisabeth (19:11)
Okay. On a more hopeful note. Just again, we talked a little bit about the Take It Down Act, which is now officially in full effect. So again, for any of our listeners, if you find content of yourself, or of somebody else that you know, and it’s posted online, you can report it to the platform that it was found.

So for example, if you’re on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, there’s always like a three dots button or some sort of, you know, report button on the post and you can use that to file a report, which again, if the report comes out clean, then they are required to remove that content within 48 hours. So that’s great news. Huge step forward. There are also, because it is illegal, there are lots of resources available online to report and remove content. There’s a list of them. And so we’ll make sure to link that below so we don’t have to just say the URLs for everything. So you can find it if you go to ftnd.org slash not alone. There’s a big, long list there. But again, we’ll also tag them below so you have access to that.

And then I wanted to ask you, Scott, we have a lot of resources. You’ve been here for a long time, working on a lot of resources. Are there any resources of ours that come to mind for people who are worried about this, concerned about it, want to take action, educate themselves, or protect their families? Anything like that of our resources that you would like to refer people to that would be helpful?

Scott (20:53)
Yeah, I think we have a ton of resources. Whether it’s, you know, you want to read something, you want to listen to something, you want to watch a video, we have all of those things. We have all of our resources available in a million different ways. So, however you want to get educated, you can do that.

I think one of the bigger things is just follow us on social, follow us on Instagram, YouTube, wherever. Elisabeth does so many great videos, talking about current events, and will keep you updated on what’s happening. Like this kind of stuff. Then also just really good really good information.

Just like if it’s a video, if it’s articles, if it’s l listening to podcasts or whatever, like just get educated. Like it there’s so much happening in the world. You can kind of fall into a doom-scroll-y bit with some of it. But I think it’s more about just like being aware of what’s going on in the world on the internet, and just so that you can, I know, protect yourself, protect your family. And be aware.

Elisabeth (22:13)
Yeah. I love that because change comes from first awareness. You can’t make a change unless you know that something’s happening. And again, this is something that a lot of people aren’t talking about. So thank you for listening and educating yourself on this. And then also being willing to do something about it. So some sort of desire. And that can come from hearing about this information and hearing how devastating this is, or maybe you have personally been impacted by this, in which case we’re so sorry. No one deserves that.

And again, there are resources available to help you. But we really want to make a dent in this and make sure that we can stop the demand for exploitation and help people to understand that this is so harmful to people. And so thanks for sharing some of those resources because I really do think that educating yourself and being motivated to make a change is huge and such a big thing that anyone can do.

Scott (23:06)
Yes.