More than 100,000 women have fallen prey to an artificial intelligence that used their social media photos to create new images of them appearing naked, it was reported today.

According to Sensity, a visual threat intelligence company based in the Netherlands, there is a “deepfake ecosystem” that exists on the messaging app Telegram. It appears that a large network of people on the app has been using the technology to create nonconsensual fake images.

Such deepfake technology in the past has been used to create fake celebrity pornographic videos, but what’s worrying about this new discovery is the fact the images were taken from regular social media accounts. According to Sensity, the deepfake bot only requires a single image of a person. The company added that it appeared some of the shared images were of minors.

“The fact is that now every one of us, just by having a social media account and posting photos of ourselves and our lives publicly — we are under threat,” Sensity founder and Chief Executive Giorgio Patrini, told the Washington Post. “Simply having an online persona makes us vulnerable to this kind of attack.”

The bot is free to use by simply joining a private messaging channel on Telegram. All users are required to do is upload a photo of a person and the bot will send an image back of her appearing naked. All of the images so far have been of females. The transformation costs nothing, although users can pay to upload multiple images that will be returned without a watermark.

There is a cause for concern, of course, when you consider the threat of people being bullied or blackmailed, although the administrator of the channel has said that the images aren’t realistic enough for anything pernicious to happen.

That admin, only known as “P,” told the BBC that the bot is only there for “entertainment” purposes and if anyone should use it for synthesizing images of minors they will be blocked from the channel. Sensity doesn’t see it that way, explaining that it has already contacted Telegram and law enforcement about the channel.

It seems the AI used to create the images is not sophisticated enough at the moment to recreate a faultless photo, but it’s undoubtedly only a matter of time before such technology becomes a major cause for concern.

Photo: Yuri Samoilov/Flickr