The Backbone of Abuse: How Infrastructure Providers Enable the Proliferation of AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery

Abstract

Advances in, and democratization of, generative-AI technologies have facilitated a phenomenal and troubling rise in the creation and sharing of AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). Although NCII is illegal in several countries, we identified 88 publicly available sites hosting it, with 38 of them fully dedicated to synthetic imagery. We found that a handful of the world’s biggest internet companies provide the underpinning infrastructure (web hosting, content delivery network, etc.). Cloudflare, for example, provides web hosting for over half of the identified sites, and the vast majority of sites can be surfaced via a Google search. We call on these companies to do better: they must revise their policies to ensure they are not facilitating the creation and sharing of NCII. More broadly, we enumerate specific regulatory reforms to mandate that companies take responsibility for the illegal content they allow to proliferate online. Content warning: this paper contains sexually violent language and describes sexually explicit content.