While AI has some useful real-world applications, it also has great potential for harm, and AI “deepfakes” are one of the most obvious and concerning areas. This was highlighted earlier this year when the ‘nudify’ app was revealed to be prevalent in both major smartphone app stores.
According to a report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), nothing has changed for Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store (via Engadget). The report says there are still many of these controversial apps in both stores, and to make matters worse, many of them are marketed as “E” (for everyone), meaning that children can download and use them.
The new misfortune of the app store
The so-called “nudify” app is easy to explain. With image editors at their core, these apps use generative AI to edit images, remove unwanted elements, and create new details to insert. You may notice that the basic idea is similar to features like Google Photos. magic editor. However, while these features have safety features, many of these stripping apps do not.
No prizes for guessing what these nudify apps are used for. Generative AI provides the ability to digitally strip away people in images, potentially creating pornographic images from shots of anyone.
While this is bad enough, TTP’s report also claims that 31 of these apps were not properly vetted and were rated “E” for all. These have therefore been made available to or imposed on children, exposing them to various avenues of harm.
The full report includes a detailed overview of some of the apps in question and their functionality, but for now suffice it to say that they are highly likely to cause harm. To make matters worse, it’s clear that they’re also a lucrative business, with TTP’s report saying that the apps they looked at generated about $122 million in revenue and were downloaded about 500 million times.
When asked for comment by TTP, Google said many of the apps mentioned in the report have been removed from its store. Apple also removed many apps, although it declined to comment.
The problems caused by these apps are obvious and there are already moves to ban them where possible. The UK government has started trying to permanently ban these apps, which is a good idea given the damage these types of apps are already causing in schools and elsewhere.
There’s no doubt that Apple and Google would have removed these apps the moment they found out about their existence, as they claim. However, the trends in these apps and their apparent value should mean a change in how we evaluate and treat these types of apps. Because if generative AI continues to exist in this form, these kinds of apps will only become more common.
