AI-powered “nudify” tools have made it trivially easy for anyone with a phone to digitally undress people and post the content online, unleashing a new form of bullying and harassment among young people, according to victims, researchers, and advocates interviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The technology has evolved rapidly. When deepfake tools first emerged around 2015, they required hundreds or thousands of photos and primarily targeted celebrities. Now, a growing number of apps can virtually remove clothing from a person based on a single image. “The threat vector has gone from Taylor Swift and Scarlett Johansson to anyone who has a single image of themselves online,” said Hany Farid, a digital forensics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Which for young people is, well, everybody.”
The nonprofit Tech Transparency Project found more than 100 nudification apps in the Apple and Google app stores in January. Those apps were collectively downloaded more than 700 million times and generated $117 million in revenue, according to app analytics firm AppMagic. Google said it disabled the search term “nudify” in its app store in May after an inquiry from The Wall Street Journal. Apple also recently disabled searches for the term. Both companies said they prohibit apps containing sexual content and remove nudification apps when detected.
A survey of 557 U.S. teens conducted by George Mason University found that more than half had created at least one image using nudification tools. A third said someone had created and shared a nude image of them without their permission. The share of teens using AI nudification was “way higher than I thought it would be,” said Chad M.S. Steel, a digital forensics researcher at George Mason who led the study.
Victims described the lasting impact. Megan Mancini in Hingham, Massachusetts, said a boy created a deepfake image of her middle-school daughter last year and shared it on Snapchat. Other students took screenshots and shared them in the hallways. The local police told Mancini the best way to get the photo offline was to upload it to a website that specializes in removing deepfakes, but federal law prevented them from giving her the image electronically. They gave her a black-and-white printout instead. Mancini filed a Title IX complaint against Hingham Public Schools. After a nearly five-month investigation, the district said there was insufficient evidence to conclude the behavior occurred in the district’s schools. The boy, who had admitted to creating the image, faced no formal disciplinary consequences, Mancini said. The school district did not respond to requests for comment.
Nadeen Noel, a high school sophomore in Iowa, said she was among about 50 students targeted by a group of boys who used a site called Undress AI. The site charges $29.99 to create nude and sexually explicit images. The deepfake images of her classmates were passed around. “It haunts me thinking about it,” Noel said. She is now taking classes online.
Angela Tipton, 46, was teaching eighth-graders in Indianapolis three years ago when boys in her class created a graphic deepfake nude image of her and sent it to students around the school and to her high-school sons. After the incident, Tipton said students would stare at her and make snide remarks. Someone created an Instagram account impersonating her and pretending to be a porn star. The school asked Tipton to continue teaching the boys, and when she refused, the district transferred her to an elementary school. Tipton took a different job in a neighboring district but said adults still mention it almost daily. She plans to change her name and move to another state this summer. “To the middle-schoolers I taught, the deepfake is real. For them, I am the teacher who was a porn star,” Tipton said. “That’s not the legacy I wanted.”
Some deepfakes have led to tragic consequences. Shannon Heacock said her 16-year-old son, Elijah, died by suicide after a stranger threatened to spread AI-generated nude photos of him unless he paid a ransom. “When we were kids we were told about a white van. These kids have to be scared of the internet,” Heacock said.
The Internet Watch Foundation, a U.K. nonprofit, reported an increase in AI videos of child sexual abuse to more than 3,400 in 2025, from about a dozen in 2024. Many included real and recognizable victims.
The federal Take It Down Act, which began enforcement in May, made it a federal crime to knowingly publish or threaten to publish nonconsensual intimate images, including those created by AI. It requires platforms to remove content within 48 hours of receiving a notification from a victim. The European Union is looking to ban nudify apps outright.
Some states criminalize deepfake nudes, but cases “still are underreported, under-investigated and under-prosecuted,” said Carrie Goldberg, one of the first lawyers to pursue cases of revenge porn and deepfakes. Victims and their families said the federal legislation puts the onus on them to enforce the law and doesn’t address some types of group chats and images downloaded to camera rolls.
Many schools still lack policies on deepfakes, even as they tell students not to use AI for cheating. “Existing in the world puts you at risk for these crimes,” said Sarah Gardener, chief executive of child-safety group Heat Initiative. “If app stores didn’t allow these dangerous apps to be uploaded in the first place it would have a huge effect.”
Anika Dugal, an undergraduate at Duke University who advocates against nonconsensual explicit deepfakes, said she has been scared to post photos to social media because she knows how they can be manipulated. “So much of building a career is putting yourself out there,” Dugal said.
MSI previously reported that the first defendants were charged under the Take It Down Act in May, and that President Donald Trump signed the law tightening penalties for nonconsensual deepfakes.