Australia clamps downs on ‘nudify’ sites used for AI-generated child abuse

The country’s internet regulator has announced that Australian internet users are prohibited from accessing a number of websites that used artificial intelligence to produce child sex exploitation material.

ESafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant announced on Thursday that the three “nudify” sites withdrew from Australia following an official warning.

According to Grant’s office, the websites had been featured in prominent cases of AI-generated child sex abuse imagery involving Australian school students and had been receiving about 100, 000 visits a month from Australians.

According to Grant, “nudify” services, which use artificial intelligence to create images of real people to appear naked, have had a “devastating” impact in Australian schools.

We took enforcement action in September because this provider failed to implement safeguards to stop children from being exposed to child sexual exploitation material, and they even used marketing features like “any girl,” with options for “schoolgirl” image generation and features like “sex mode,” Grand said in a statement.

The development comes after Grant’s office issued a formal warning to the British-based company that runs the sites in September and threatened civil penalties of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($33.22 million) if it didn’t implement measures to stop image-based abuse.

According to Grant, Hugging Face, a hosting service for AI models, has taken additional steps to comply with Australian law, including changing its terms of service to mandate account holders take steps to reduce the risks of platform misuse.

Australia has been at the forefront of international efforts to stop under-16s from using social media and stop them from downloading deep-fake apps.

With the rapid expansion of platforms that can produce photo-realistic material with the click of a mouse, AI has become increasingly popular for creating non-consensual sexually explicit images.