Ads for apps that use AI to create fake videos of individuals kissing anyone they need are flooding social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
From Rashi SrivastavaForbes contributor
Meta and TikTok have run hundreds of ads for apps that use AI to create fake kissing videos of individuals, allowing users to upload photos of any two people and have the AI turn them right into a video of them kissing. The apps are marketed as tools that will mean you can immediately “kiss anyone you want” – with no consent required.
These AI kissing apps are similar in concept to “AI Nudifier” apps that produce non-consensual deepfake pornography. They create believable videos of individuals doing something they didn’t do. And the convenience with which they accomplish that is a worrying habituation to deepfake images.
While the ads aren’t sexually explicit just like the flood of AI-generated pornographic content that has flooded social media platforms like Instagram, Reddit and YouTube, they could be equally dangerous, said Haley McNamara, an executive on the National Center for Sexual Exploitation Forbes.
“It doesn’t have to be explicit to be exploitative,” McNamara said. “If doing something to someone offline, kissing, undressing, etc., without their consent is transgressive, then doing that online is also transgressive.”
Meta has run over 2,500 ads for “AI Kissing” apps on Instagram and Facebook Forbes Review found. There are currently around 1,000 lively. According to its ad library, TikTok has shown about 1,000 ads to thousands and thousands of users in European countries. (TikTok’s ad library doesn’t include ads shown to its U.S.-based users.) Most of those ads show celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Emma Watson and Gal Gadot kissing. Others show videos of random people kissing and tout that AI could mean you can “kiss your ex” and “kiss your crush.” It is unclear whether the people within the videos are real or generated by AI. Johansson, Watson and Gadot didn’t reply to requests for comment. futurism first reported the spread of those ads on social media platforms.
Meta also promotes “AI hugging” apps, ads for which show AI-generated videos of youngsters hugging cartoon characters equivalent to Dora the Explorer, Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry. Some, like a video of a young girl hugging an older man, promise parents that AI-powered apps could allow their children to “hug grandparents they’ve never met.” The social media giant ran about 1,200 AI hugging app ads, a Forbes Search found. Over 300 are still lively.
“This trend normalizes exploitative deepfakes and makes non-consensual participation in intimate or sexualized images a joke.”
AI-generated videos of individuals kissing and hugging are already circulating on social media. A video of Taylor Swift hugging Kim Jong Un has about 30 million views on Instagram. At the tip of December, a deepfake video of Elon Musk and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni kissing went viral on X.
Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts said Forbes that these “AI kissing” ads don’t violate the corporate’s policies. While nudity, sexually explicit and sexually suggestive content violates metas Advertising Standards and Meta don’t allow ads that “depict, advocate, or coordinate sexual acts with non-consenting parties.” Videos of kisses and hugs are permitted.
After contacting us Forbes, TikTok removed the ads for violating its policies. The video-sharing platform requires advertisers to acquire consent from public or private people depicted of their ads, even when the ads are AI-generated, said TikTok spokeswoman Ariane de Selliers Forbes.
According to the web sites, the businesses behind these video generators seem like based outside the United States in countries equivalent to the United Arab Emirates, Italy and China. The apps can be found freed from charge within the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store and have already been downloaded thousands and thousands of times. The “AI Kissing” feature is an element of a broader suite of AI-based photo editing features within the apps, equivalent to retouching old photos, turning still images into videos and predicting what two people’s future babies would appear like. Apple and Google didn’t reply to requests for comment.
“It was incredibly scary to meet him.”
The proliferation of AI kissing apps, fueled by the virality of social media, highlights the worrying prevalence of deepfakes within the age of generative AI. Using these seemingly innocuous apps could open the door to tools that might generate more graphic images like deepfake porn and other forms of image-based sexual abuse, McNamara said. “It’s just a real Pandora’s box,” she said.
“This trend normalizes exploitative deepfakes and makes non-consensual participation in intimate or sexualized images a joke,” she said. “It’s easy to trivialize something like that when you think about other people, but when you think about someone in your own environment who takes such pictures of themselves, someone you don’t want to have pictures of, then think about it “I can tell everyone that this is a violation.”
This is especially worrying as illegal AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) experiences an unprecedented rise. Over the past two years, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has received over 7,000 reports of generative AI-related child exploitation material. In one case, a pedophile allegedly filmed children at Disneyland and created hundreds of illegal images of them using the favored AI tool Stable Diffusion. And because of unrestricted access to AI image generators, teenage highschool students have, in several cases, created deepfake nude images of their underage classmates, sometimes resulting in criminal charges. Meta also had difficulty monitoring ads for such AI “nudity” web sites, which one among these sites said received 90 percent of its traffic from Instagram and Facebook Fake newsletter.
People who’ve come across AI kiss ads while scrolling through social media say they’ve found them disturbing. In December, Alice Siregar saw a spike in AI kissing app ads on TikTok. An AI analyst herself at a technology consulting firm, she was dismayed that the technology was getting used in a “deeply unethical” way.
“It was incredibly scary to encounter,” she said.
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