Spain’s Guardia Civil police said on Monday that they were investigating five youths suspected of using Artifical Intelligence (AI) to generate hyper-realistic nude images of 20 underage girls and circulating them online.
The suspects in this latest case of alleged ‘deepfake’ pornography include several minors, police said.
They knew their alleged victims, who were all from the province of Seville (Andalusia). Officers began their investigation after receiving a complaint from the parents of one of the girls.
‘Once the images were manipulated, they were disseminated through groups on well-known social media, causing significant emotional and social harm to the victims,’ the Guardia Civil said in a statement.
‘The realism of the images made it very difficult to distinguish between those that were authentic and those that had been modified.’
The five suspects face possible charges of child pornography and breach of privacy laws. As AI has boomed, so has so-called ‘deepfake’ pornography.
AI enables users to generate hyper-realistic images and videos with minimal effort and money, often using photos of victims fully clothed that are lifted from their social media accounts and then manipulated to make them appear naked.
#OperacionesGC | Investigados 5 jóvenes por crear y difundir imágenes de 20 menores desnudas por #InteligenciaArtificial en la provincia de #Sevilla.
— Guardia Civil (@guardiacivil) August 5, 2024
▶️Generaban una gran dificultad para distinguir entre las auténticas y las que habían sido modificadas
🔗https://t.co/Vwy8ik7f0l pic.twitter.com/uhAeXCi8Rf
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