SF shuts down 10 of the world's most-visited websites using AI to generate explicit content

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- San Francisco's city attorney announced a breakthrough in a lawsuit on Monday filed last year targeting website owners from operating sites that use AI-generated non-consensual explicit images of real adults and minors.

Ten of 16 websites that have been using artificial intelligence to generate explicit content have been shut down. City Attorney David Chiu said these website operators violated state and federal laws.

San Francisco is known as the AI capital of the world and now the city's attorney wants to make sure this home is protecting adults and minors against AI generated deepfake images used for explicit purposes.

"The investigation and this work has brought into the darkest corners of the internet we are talking about the use of artificial intelligence to generative non-consensual pornography," said Chiu.

In the lawsuit, City Attorney Chiu goes after 16 website owners and operators who he says violate state and federal laws prohibiting deepfake pornography, revenge pornography, and child pornography. 10 of those sites are now gone.

"They are offline, or they are no longer accessible in California. We also announced that one of the defendants Briver has agreed to a settlement a permanent injunction where they have agreed that they will no longer going to continue in this business and they are going to pay $100,000 to the city in civil penalties," said Chiu.

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According to the city, these websites attracted 200 million visitors in the first 6 months of 2024. Sunny Liu, Director of Research at the Stanford University's Social Media Lab, believes this lawsuit is promising but there is still work to do.

"We don't have a clear understanding how prevalent they are but the data shows from "Thorn" from adolescents and children 6% of girls saying that they are being victimized," said Liu.

State senators Josh Becker and Aisha Wahab have been at the forefront of creating multiple state legislations to combat this and know AI is moving faster than policy.

"We had to basically link and say hey there is this new thing AI and the AI generated revenge pornography should be treated the same as revenge pornography so it's really a legal piece. We have seen this kind of across the landscape where we have to adjust now for the existence of artificial intelligence and make sure that our existing laws catch up," said Senator Josh Becker.

"Child pornography is illegal, and we make sure that images generated through AI that depict a child in inappropriate ways should also be illegal and that earlier this year was influential in arresting somebody that had over 100 plus images of these types of imagery," said Senator Aisha Wahab.

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A huge part of this investigation was determining who was behind these sites.

"We have unmasked a number of individuals and corporations that have been hiding their identities," said Chiu.

Ten sites have been shut down, but what about the other websites in the lawsuit?

City Attorney Chiu said they are still pursuing this and one of the ways they were able to track the first 10 was by contacting other companies that were being used to facilitate this crime with their search engines or payment methods.