AI image The generator’s launch left more than a million photos and videos created using its systems exposed and available to anyone on the Internet, according to a fresh study reviewed by WIRED. According to the researcher who discovered the leaked dataset, the “overwhelming majority” of the images featured nudity and “adult content.” Some of them appeared to depict children or the faces of children replaced with the bodies of naked adults generated by artificial intelligence.
Multiple websites — including MagicEdit and DreamPal — apparently used the same insecure database, according to security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who discovered the vulnerability in October. At that time, Fowler said, about 10,000 fresh photos were being added to the database every day. To indicate how people may have used image generation and editing tools, these images contained “unaltered” photos of real people who may have been left “nude” without their consent or whose faces were swapped with other naked bodies.
“The real problem is simply innocent people, especially minors, whose photos are being used without their consent to create sexual content,” says Fowler, a prolific leaker database hunter who published his findings on ExpressVPN Blog. Fowler says this is the third misconfigured AI image-generating database he has found online this year – and all of them appear to contain explicit photos taken without their consent, including those of juvenile people and children.
Fowler’s findings come as artificial intelligence-based image generation tools continue to be used to maliciously create clear images of people. A immense ecosystem of “nudification” services that are used by millions of people and earn millions of dollars a year apply artificial intelligence to “rip” the clothes off people – almost exclusively women – in photos. Photos stolen from social media can be edited with a few clicks, leading to shocking abuse and harassment of women. Meanwhile, reports criminals using artificial intelligence to create child sexual abuse material, including: a number of indecent images involving children has doubled in the last year.
“We take these concerns extremely seriously,” says a spokesman for the startup DreamX, which runs MagicEdit and DreamPal. A spokesman says the influencer marketing company associated with the database, called SocialBook, is run “by a separate legal entity and is not involved” in operating the other sites. “These entities have some historical connections through founders and existing assets, but operate independently, offering separate product lines,” says the spokesman.
“SocialBook is not connected to the database you mentioned, does not use this storage, and has not been involved in its operation or management at any time,” a SocialBook spokesperson tells WIRED. “The images in question were not generated, processed or stored by SocialBook’s systems. SocialBook operates independently and plays no role in the infrastructure described.”