Photograph: SuppliedĪlaiksandr Babichau, 30, identified in social media accounts as Dasha Babicheva’s brother, also appears to be closely linked to ClothOff. View image in fullscreen A profile picture taken from the LinkedIn account in the name of Alaiksandr Babichau. Screenshots seen by the Guardian indicate that a Telegram account in the name of Dasha Babicheva, who social media accounts suggest is in her mid-20s and lives in the Belarus capital, Minsk, has conducted business on ClothOff’s behalf, including discussing applications to banks, changes to the website and business partnerships. The credits are used to upload photographs of any woman or girl and return the same image stripped of clothing. The app can be accessed through a smartphone by clicking a button that confirms the user is over 18, and charges approximately £8.50 for 25 credits. Their trail leads to Belarus and Russia but passes through businesses registered in Europe and front companies based in the heart of London.ĬlothOff, whose website receives more than 4m monthly visits, invites users to “undress anyone using AI”. Photograph: Screengrabīut a six-month investigation, conducted for a new Guardian podcast series called Black Box, can reveal the names of several people who have done work for ClothOff or who our investigation suggests are linked to the app. View image in fullscreen A picture of ‘Ewan Liam Torres’, who ClothOff claims is its CEO, but which is likely to be an AI-generated image. In the year since the app was launched, the people running ClothOff have carefully guarded their anonymity, digitally distorting their voices to answer media questions and, in one case, using AI to generate an entirely fake person who they claimed was their CEO. The New Jersey incident has prompted a civil lawsuit and helped fuel a bipartisan effort in the US Congress to ban the creation and spread of nonconsensual deepfake images.Īt the centre of both the incidents in Spain and New Jersey was the same app, called ClothOff. The Spanish incident flared into global news last year and made Almendralejo, a small town of faded renaissance-era churches and plazas near the Portuguese border, the site of the latest in a series of warning shots from an imminent future where AI tools allow anyone to generate hyper-realistic images with a few clicks.īut while deepfakes of pop stars such as Taylor Swift have generated the most attention, they represent the tip of an iceberg of nonconsensual images that are proliferating across the internet and which police are largely powerless to stop.Īs Adib was learning of the pictures, thousands of miles away at the Westfield high school in New Jersey, a strikingly similar case was playing out: many girls targeted by explicit deepfake images generated by students in their classes. But they had been unable to identify the people who developed the app, who prosecutors suspect are based somewhere in eastern Europe, they said. State prosecutors are considering charges against some of the children, who created the images using an app downloaded from the internet. “My concern was that these images had reached pornographic sites that we still don’t know about today,” Adib told the Guardian from her clinic in the town. Some of the girls whose likenesses were being spread were refusing to go to school, suffering panic attacks, being blackmailed and getting bullied in public. It was a deepfake, one of dozens of nude images of schoolgirls in Almendralejo that had been generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and which had been circulating in the town for weeks in a WhatsApp group set up by other schoolchildren.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |