San Francisco City Attorney Sues Operators of AI Deepfake Pornography Websites for Violations of State and Federal Law
August 15, 2024
In August 2024, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against 16 websites accused of using generative AI to create and distribute nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes, including images of minors. The sites, which had over 200 million visits in six months, invited users to upload real images to generate explicit fakes. By March 2025, 11 of the targeted websites had shut down following legal pressure.
- Alleged deployer
- operators-of-16-deepfake-pornography-websites
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- women-depicted-in-deepfake-pornography, minors-depicted-in-deepfake-pornography
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1004
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.