Some X users report seeing ads for apps that use AI to “undress” women in photos; TikTok and Meta have started to block search terms related to “nudify” apps
The reports followed evidence that AI undressing services were already gaining audience: a December analysis of the sector's rapid growth identified dozens of providers with more than 24 million unique visitors in September 2023. The story therefore captures a distribution problem, not merely the arrival of a new image-generation capability.
Meta and TikTok's search-term blocks create an early contrast with reports of paid promotion on X: platforms can constrain discovery at the query layer, but advertising and app-store channels remain separate enforcement surfaces.
First-order effects
Users searching Meta and TikTok for terms tied to nudify apps face reduced direct discovery, while X users may still encounter promotions for such services in ads.
Meta and TikTok must translate a narrow search intervention into moderation and advertising enforcement if providers shift to alternative wording or acquisition channels.
Second-order effects
Providers lose a low-friction route to users on the platforms imposing blocks and have an incentive to test ads, aliases, web distribution, and app listings elsewhere.
The uneven response puts pressure on X and mobile app stores to demonstrate whether their ad-review and listing rules prevent the same services from reaching users; Apple later removed apps advertised for nonconsensual nude-image creation in a post-investigation App Store crackdown.
Third-order effects
If platforms address only search terms, enforcement is likely to become a recurring cat-and-mouse exercise across queries, ads, domains, and app listings rather than a one-time removal problem.
The longer-run issue is whether distribution platforms treat AI-enabled sexual-image abuse as a cross-product safety category. Later reporting that such apps remained searchable in major app stores despite stated policies suggests policy language alone may not close those channels.
The trend: This is one data point in the commercialization of generative-AI tools, where platform safety controls increasingly determine whether harmful consumer applications can scale.
X is also the social media platform that gets a significant amount of traffic from adult sites. For most others, it's minimal. I thought that was a bit strange.
X Lags Behind TikTok, Meta In Restricting ‘Nudify’ Apps for Non-Consensual AI Porn A week after TikTok and Meta blocked certain search terms related to so-called “nudify” apps, X has not taken the same measures - “Searching “undress” on TikTok Brings up no results either in the “…
This isn't just on my timeline, either. I was on Kirk's profile page. Twitter literally allowed a DeepFake AI nude generator to advertise on the profile page of ESPN's most prominent college football personality. A verified account with 1.6 million followers. [image]
Pretty sure X is distributing an advertisement for illegal activity. The purpose is explicitly written as a chat: “User: [explicit image sent] Woman: did you hack me? Delete this photo immediately!” This is similar to descriptions of revenge porn, but with generative AI.
So last night some weirdo emailed me threatening to leak my “nudes” which was just an Ai generated image from a pic he took off my insta.. E for effort there dude but even I did have nudes to leak posting them would only grow my audience base not hinder it lol [image]
Is anybody getting ads for an AI app that promises it can make fake nudes of any girl you want, and pairs it with a text message screenshot that absolutely implies that you can use the pics to blackmail said girl? I've gotten 5 in the last few hrs & I find it disgusting as fuck.
@davidthewid They don't even try to pretend about the tool's purpose; the screenshot shows someone using the generation to harass the victim in the photograph. This is sickening.
It doesn't surprise me that X is running ads for apps like these. It's par for the course, in fact. I'm slightly more surprised, though not shocked, that the government hasn't made these apps illegal yet. What are they doing there in Congress?
New: A week after TikTok and Meta began restricting the search term “undress” after a report on the popularity of so-called “nudify” AI apps, X still hasn't done the same as users complain of ads on their timelines, Motherboard found. https://www.vice.com/...
X's downward spiral continues through the bottom of the barrel as it begins to show advertisements for nonconsensual AI-undressing apps: “Did you hack me? Delete this photo immediately!” the ad says https://www.404media.co/...