Parents’ horror as AI-generated images of naked girls as young as 11 spread online
The lives of young local girls in southwestern Spain have been upended after AI-generated naked images of them were spread on social media.
Fake images of as many as 30 girls aged between 11 and 17 were made using photographs of them fully clothed, often taken from their social media accounts.
The real pictures of the girls from Almendralejo, a tight-knit town of about 34,000 in Badajoz, were processed through an app that generates undressed AI images.
Some of the victims were blackmailed to hand over money or else the deepfake images would be sent to their loved ones on Whatsapp, Vozpópuli reported.
José Ramón Paredes, a father in the area, told the Spanish newspaper that the plot dates back as early as June, with victims not speaking up out of fear.
But as youngsters went back to school for the new academic year, rumours spread of the phoney naked images being passed around pupils’ phones.
Three ‘ringleaders’, Paredes said, create WhatsApp group chats to extort young girls like his daughters, typically demanding about €100 (£87).
‘We have mutual trust with our daughters and they tell us everything,’ he said.
Paredes’ wife, Miriam Al Adib, a gynaecologist with a large social media following, has sought to make the scheme headline news.
‘Girls, don’t be afraid to report such acts, tell your mothers,’ she said in an Instagram post last week.
‘Mothers of affected who are not yet aware tell me so that you are aware of the group we have created.’
‘When you are the victim of a crime, if you are robbed, for example, you file a complaint and you don’t hide because the other person has caused you harm,’ she added to the BBC.
‘But with crimes of a sexual nature, the victim often feels shame and hides and feels responsible. So I wanted to give that message: it’s not your fault.’
The spate of deepfakes has cast a spectre of fear among the young girls in the community, María Blanco Rayo, the mother of a 14-year-old, added.
Blanco Rayo said some girls – her daughter included – are ‘bearing up’ while others refuse to leave the house.
Gema Lorenzo, who has a 16-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, added: ‘Those of us who have kids are very worried.
‘You’re worried about two things: if you have a son you worry he might have done something like this; and if you have a daughter, you’re even more worried, because it’s an act of violence.’
The suspects in the case are aged between 12 and 14, though Spain’s patchy penal code means it’s unclear how exactly they could be charged.
The law does not cover the creation of sexual images involving adults.
But Javier Izquierdo, the children protection lead of the national police’s cybercrime unit, told reporters yesterday the deep fakes, if ‘realistic, can be considered child pornography’.
Minors in Spain can only face criminal charges from the age of 14 upwards, ‘therefore it is the Prosecutor’s Office’s decision’, he added, the Noticias de Navarra newspaper reported.
They may also be charged for breaching privacy laws.
Spain’s National Police is investigating whether the false images were uploaded to content-sharing platforms such as OnlyFans or pornographic websites.
Detectives fear that regardless of whether the victims complied with the blackmailers’ demands, they may have uploaded the images to websites that rely on subscription rates or tips for steady money.
Izquierdo added: ‘There is no evidence that they have left the WhatsApp and Telegram groups in which they originated.’
He stressed that while scrubbing images off the internet is a tall order, law enforcement will try to ‘minimise the possible exposure of the images’.
Similar cases of people using AI-powered bots to produce nude images have happened before, Izquierdo said, but none have seen this much media coverage.
These are ‘extremely serious events’, he said, so people ‘must be made aware of the risk of this technology and its misuse’.
Under-18s must know ‘it is not about scaring them but educating them in a new cybersecurity culture’.
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