Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms.
The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an “AI image styler.” A voice-over for one of the video advertisements, viewed by WIRED, promotes the tool as having “no restrictions,” saying “all the characters are real people” and describing it as “the AI that men actually use.” In one ad, a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician is seen in front of a US flag and the flag of the president of the US above the caption “What if she moved?” She then winks, before the ad cuts to a scene of a woman with the same face performing in a pornographic video.
The Kromix app, which was hosted by Apple’s App Store prior to a request for comment from WIRED, invites paid users to upload photos so that it can use them in scenarios including “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” Videos on the app also feature AI-generated pornographic videos of women wearing Spider-Man costumes. Requests for comment sent to a contact listed in the app went unanswered.
Apple has struggled to keep similar tools, which violate its policies against nonconsensual intimate imagery, nudifying, and sexually explicit content, off the App Store. San Francisco’s city attorney sent the company a cease-and-desist letter earlier this summer demanding the removal of 13 specific apps and that it stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit deepfake images.
The ads were, according to Meta’s ad library, exclusively targeted to male users with the tagline “Unleash Next-gen AI Magic” and were removed after WIRED asked about them. In all, the account tied to the campaign ran 32 ads, according to Meta, which ran for between five and 46 hours. Most received 10 or fewer impressions.
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, which discovered the ads, says, “All of the ads that we’ve seen so far broadly on the nudify issue are exclusively sexualizing and nudifying and putting women into AI-generated porn. And this raises a lot of questions about how Meta is going to deal with this kind of content, not just broadly but when it comes to female politicians, when the company is actively running ads containing this content on their platform.”
Politicians and elected officials, overwhelmingly women, have been a target of nonconsensual deepfake images and videos for years. In January, as Grok was used to create around 3 million sexualized images of women and girls, officials in Sweden, England, and Northern Ireland were targeted by people using the technology, often using official images as a starting point.
“As the production and distribution of AI-generated content have democratized, formerly benign media—official portraits, video from a press conference—have become raw material for low- and no-code tools that anyone with an internet connection can use,” says Benjamin Shultz, the lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project, who is investigating how the ecosystem of harmful deepfake technology is used to target politicians.
According to the company’s public documentation, before an ad is published on Meta’s platforms, which includes Instagram and Facebook, each ad is “reviewed” against its policies that detail what advertisers can and can’t post. “Our ad review system relies primarily on automated tools to check ads and business assets against our policies,” the company’s advertising standards say, pointing out that the review starts before ads begin running. The page running the advertisements was created on August 3, not long before the ads began running, and had no followers—two things that might have indicated to Meta that the account was suspicious.