AI Users Create Porn Deepfakes To Sextort Teens

Lifestyle

To Alex Mitchell

June 14, 2023 | 5:28 PM

Following the tragic news that a Michigan teenage football player committed suicide after being victimized by online criminals, cybersecurity experts risk sharing suggestive images with strangers. It warns teenagers and parents that it is on the rise.

Now that unscrupulous operators around the world are enjoying unfettered access to artificial intelligence, they can now create sophisticated deepfakes and AI-generated porn with just a few mouse clicks.

These advances increase the risk of individuals being blackmailed after sending intrusive photos, texts, or information to someone who turns out to be a fraudster, a practice known as sextortion.

And vigilance is more important than ever.

Jordan Demey, 17, took his own life after being tricked by a Nigerian scammer into sending a dangerous photo of himself on Instagram to a supposedly interested woman.

Scammers hacked the girl’s account, demanded nude photos from Demay, demanded a $1,000 ransom, or demanded that the photos be sent to friends and family.

Demay’s case was one of more than a dozen recorded sextortion suicides last year, a serious crime that killed 3,000 people that year, mostly young men and boys, according to the FBI.

The agency warned on June 5 that technological advances in AI could lead to nightmarish new numbers of such scams through things like deepfakes and face generation programs.

“The FBI continues to receive reports from victims, including minors and non-consenting adults, whose photos and videos have been altered into explicit content,” the FBI said in a release.

“As of April 2023, the FBI will not allow fake images or videos made from content posted on social media sites or web posts, provided to malicious actors upon request, or video chats. We are observing an increase in sextortion victims reporting the use of fake images and videos captured during.”

AI is now so powerful that any ordinary person can create fake content at scale. No advanced training required. Lisa Palmer, chief AI strategist at consulting firm AI Leaders, told the Post.

Here are some steps parents can take to protect their teens from growing victims of threats.

Maximize privacy settings

For the better part of two decades, scammers scoured the social media world looking for victims.

With the ability to manipulate innocuous content, like pulling clips and photos from people’s profiles, it’s doubly important to dig into effective privacy settings. Be sure to police your content with very restrictive settings and only see it for users within your close network.

Otherwise, Palmer advises anyone online could have access.

Read the fine print in our Social Media Terms

As detailed in our Terms of Service, it is very common for social apps to share much of your personal usage data, personal information, and in some cases biometrics with third parties. While tedious and time consuming, Palmer said it’s a best practice to actually read these contracts in depth as a best practice to keep data, photos, etc. out of the wrong hands. I was.

She recommends leveraging AI to make this happen.

“By copying your terms of service into a language model like ChatGPT, you can break down all the riskiest things you agree to,” Palmer said.

have an honest conversation

Cybersecurity expert Joseph Steinberg said the best way to keep teenagers from being exposed online is to inform them about life-altering risks.

“We certainly want to prevent them from getting into dangerous situations, but we need to educate them. There is no substitute … there is no technical way to prevent this kind of damage. [dangerous] Communication is no longer online,” he told the Post.

“There are a lot of technologies trying to do that, but none of them are perfect,” says Steinberg. “He can’t control with 100% certainty what a child has access to.”

He added that teens are good at hiding their online activity, sometimes carrying a second cheap mobile device.

Palmer also warns parents that children may find ways to hide suggestive apps on their phones so they can’t be seen when others are around.

It is important that parents tell their children if they are victims of sextortion that they can and should do so, a platform that counsels those under threat. Privacy expert Frank Ahern emphasized:

“One of the big problems is that the kids have nowhere to go,” Ahern told the Post, and was frequently contacted by crazy teenage boys who were underage. He added that there was nothing he could do.

“I said to them, ‘You have to contact your parents, they love you, they will listen to you,'” he says. “But they are very afraid to do it.”