“Summoning a wizard who can nudify her,” wrote an anonymous 4chan user last week, posting on the site’s /r/ board, a hub for “adult requests” of specific explicit imagery.
Attached to the post was an image of a blonde woman in glasses, an open black jacket, white tank top, and ripped jeans, posing on a low wall with a sweeping view of an old-world city and a river behind her. It’s the kind of picture you’d see on a friend’s Instagram account during their vacation in Europe. On the left edge of the image, you can see that someone else has been cropped out of the photo.
The 4chan anon explained what they wanted from a “wizard,” a site term for anyone skilled at manipulating pictures of women to render deepfakes in which they appear to be undressed, committing sexual acts, or fulfilling a given fetish: “big juggs and thick body,” the user specified. “Bonus praise if you can leave her jacket on.” A few hours later, someone else replied with the altered image, which depicted the same woman, in the same pose and locale, but without a shirt, breasts exposed. (Yes, she still had the jacket on.)
“Thank you so much wiz,” replied an anon—presumably the same person who had made the original request. “Great edit <3.”
Anyone whose likeness is public may be subjected to this same invasive exploitation, but the overwhelming majority of victims of these nudifying acts are women. And new research confirms that such synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) can be created in a collaborative process that strengthens the bonds of an online male community built on shared misogyny.
On Thursday, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a political advocacy group that seeks to counter extremism, hate speech, and misinformation, published a paper on this topic by Leonie Oehmig, a researcher and policy associate in Berlin. Oehmig has studied deepfake intimate image abuse in depth; here she turned her attention to the sordid world of 4chan’s photo-editing “wizards” and their sycophantic followers.
Oehmig found that 4chan threads like the one described above function as an origin point for the dissemination of NCII across more private platforms, including Telegram and Discord. More curiously, though, they tend to follow a familiar script and hierarchical social norms.
Men hoping to humiliate and dehumanize women supply the photographic material and command prompts. WIRED reviewed posts from anonymous 4chan users demanding everything from “black bikini” to “pregnant” to “her hands tied in BDSM style.” Oehmig’s paper describes requests “that subjects be depicted in explicitly humiliating scenarios, incorporating elements such as spit or smeared make-up or placing targets in degrading and symbolic contexts such as being crucified or displayed in a circus.”
A so-called wizard who fulfills one of these fantasies is then lavished with praise. “Holy hell, you truly work miracles,” reads a recent reply from someone pleased with a wizard’s work.
“It was so glorifying,” Oehmig tells WIRED. “It’s like, ‘Do your magic, work your magic.’ These people who were creating this abusive material are referred to as ‘sir’ or ‘master.’ I guess that’s one of the reasons why the creators actually do it.” (The title of “wizard” also has a notable connection to incel culture, where it refers to a man who is still a virgin past the age of 30.)
Oehmig’s analysis covered thousands of posts from early December 2025 through early March of 2026, with this pattern repeating itself over and over, revealing a power structure where men without the means to digitally strip women naked worship the men who can make their clothes disappear. In some ways, Oehmig observes, this dominance dynamic reflects the “urge for power and control” that drives sexual abuse in the first place.
