Nearly a year after AI-generated nude images of high school girls upended a community in southern Spain, a juvenile court this summer sentenced 15 of their classmates to a year of probation.
But the artificial intelligence tool used to create the harmful deepfakes is still easily accessible on the internet, promising to “undress any photo” uploaded to the website within seconds.
Now a new effort to shut down the app and others like it is being pursued in California, where San Francisco this week filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that experts say could set a precedent but will also face many hurdles.
“The proliferation of these images has exploited a shocking number of women and girls across the globe,” said David Chiu, the elected city attorney of San Francisco who brought the case against a group of widely visited websites based in Estonia, Serbia, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
“These images …