Oakland County man allegedly used AI to generate porn of an influencer, she fought back
Michigan man allegedly used AI to create pornography of an influencer, she fought back
Imagine opening up your direct messages to find pictures of you, but something is off. The naked, graphic photos are not you at all, but generated by AI, created by a husband and father.
OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. (FOX 2) - A case of sextortion using AI-generated naked photos of a content creator on Instagram shows the dangers of the wild west of the rapidly growing technology.
Big picture view:
Imagine opening up your direct messages to find pictures of you, but something is off. The naked, graphic photos are not you at all, but generated by AI, created by a husband and father.
"He assured me that he was a stand-up gentleman, had a wife, had a daughter, and respected women immensely," said the victim, who will not be named in this story.
The woman in the images is a content creator from Oregon. She started a few years ago with boudoir photography, and now it’s everyday stuff.
The backstory:
A year prior, she opened up her DMs, and staring back at her was a naked photo of herself, AI-generated, with taunting, aggressive messages from an anonymous follower.
"I don’t want to have like a knee-jerk reaction that makes him mad or pushes a button where he like then puts it on the internet. I didn’t know what his intentions were," she said.
Keeping him at bay with a thumbs up here and there until this week, he sent a whole album of nude AI photos, now threatening to post them online if she didn’t respond. He went on to talk about masturbation and then threatened sexual assault against her if she didn’t write back.
"If you’re going to start making sexual assault threats at me, that’s something I take very seriously, and that’s when I was like absolutely not, I’m going to come after you for that," she said.
And she did, with her almost 100,000 followers.
Dig deeper:
She tracked the man to Oakland County. Turns out he’s a graphic designer with kids and a wife. After that, he blocked her everywhere.
But the public shaming commenced.
"If I can help mitigate these things from happening in the future, I think that I have to at this point," she said.
What's next:
Everyone has seen sextortion cases ending in victims committing suicide, and that’s exactly why she's vowing to hold people accountable behind their keyboards.
"He could actually be far worse than creating AI images on the internet, and I’m probably not the only one he was doing this to," she said.