Nearly Half of Teens Report Seeing AI Sexual Content. Bay Area Leaders Want to Shut It Down

A new report from Common Sense Media found that 44% of U.S. teens have seen AI-generated sexual content, and nearly a quarter of those have seen content depicting themselves or peers. Bay Area lawmakers, including State Sen. Josh Becker and San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, are pushing to crack down on apps and websites that enable such deepfakes, which experts say are driving girls away from online platforms and harming mental health.

Nearly Half of Teens Report Seeing AI Sexual Content. Bay Area Leaders Want to Shut It Down Sexualized images generated by artificial intelligence have flooded kids’ screens. Bay Area /news/tag/bay-area lawmakers are racing to crack down on sites and apps that make this possible. A new report https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai from Common Sense Media, a leading nonprofit researching child safety online, found that 44% of teens have seen sexual content they believe to be AI-generated — and that nearly a quarter of those who’ve seen it say they’ve seen content of themselves or of their peers. State Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, said the report confirms what lawmakers have been warning about for years. “Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to create fake images that are explicit images of real people, and too often young people are the victims,” Becker said on Tuesday. “It’s taken something that may have happened before — cyberbullying — and just put it on steroids.” The study followed up on the organization’s 2023 report about online pornography’s impact on teens. Its authors surveyed 1,314 teens in the U.S. and held focus groups to contextualize the numbers. They found that 67% of teens feared being depicted in deepfakes — extremely realistic images, videos or audio clips showing something that never happened — without their consent. One teen surveyed in the report said that “everyone should have at least a small degree of worry because it’s so easy to make it , so accessible, and it also feels pushed.” Experts say that generative AI has made it easier than ever to create deepfakes. While big platforms generally have safety features to prevent making them sexually explicit, they do not always https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c802ldjdklzo work, according to reporting from the BBC. Many users will turn instead to smaller, anonymous /news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit apps and websites to generate the content. “AI has made a severe form of sexual harassment easy enough for almost any kid with a phone to carry out,” said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media. Kids can be targeted by deepfakes as early as elementary school, and especially in middle school and high school, said Emma Le, the head of operations at the Center for Gender Equitable AI, a youth-led organization addressing gender based harms caused by emerging technologies. Le said that most deepfakes target women and that they have “huge consequences on girls’ mental health,” causing some to leave school, experience depression and contemplate self-harm. More and more teens are scaling back their online activity to protect themselves from being deepfaked, according to Steyer. Le also said that deepfakes are linked to an increase in gender-based harassment that’s driving women and girls away from online platforms — a key public sphere for many. “Girls are withdrawing from the public eye,” Le said. “That’s going to have huge consequences in the future for women’s rights, women’s empowerment.” Surveyed teens reported seeing this explicit AI content across platforms including, but not limited to, TikTok, Instagram and X. While teens may see the content on big platforms, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said that small, often anonymous and sometimes international companies are the ones that produce so-called “nudify” tools — AI-driven apps and websites that allow users to make sexually explicit deepfakes. Because you can’t determine which website or app generated an image, “victims often have no recourse,” Chiu said. “Once the images are distributed, you can’t control where they go,” Chiu said. Le emphasized that because the images cannot be completely scrubbed, victims of these crimes can worry about the images popping up again, especially if they have a job in the public eye. Lawmakers at every level are working to tackle this issue. Last year, Congress passed the Take It Down Act https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/146 — prohibiting the nonconsensual publication of explicit images and requiring online platforms to establish reporting systems and remove the images promptly. Becker said that California has been “leading the nation” with legislation updated “for this new AI age.” Over the past few years, the state passed laws banning deepfake revenge porn /news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content — and AI-generated child porn /news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit . Becker described legislating in this space as a “cat and mouse game” and said that lawmakers are “going to have to keep working to make sure our laws can keep up.” In San Francisco, Chiu is already using these laws to hold Silicon Valley companies to account. Last week, Chiu sent Google and Apple cease-and-desist letters asking them to take down 13 apps that were being used to target women and girls. “It shouldn’t be on us to tell large technology companies that their app stores are being used to continue to victimize millions of women and girls around the globe,” Chiu said. “We are asking these companies to be proactive in preventing this abuse in the future.” A Google spokesperson said that all five apps referenced in Chiu’s letter have been suspended. “When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store,” the company said in a statement. A spokesperson for Apple said that “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we aggressively work to identify and remove apps — as well as the developer accounts behind them — that attempt to evade our processes and policies.” Steyer urged more action from both the tech industry and from American lawmakers, but also emphasized the importance of talking to kids about this content. “As a parent or a grandparent, this is sort of your worst nightmare, but you gotta talk to your kids about it … because it’s real. The numbers speak for themselves,” Steyer said. The report https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai contains advice for parents, schools and policymakers dealing with this content and these conversations.