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A Telegram bot that does nothing but AI generate nonconsensual short videos of men ejaculating on women’s faces has more than 100,000 monthly active users.
Telegram bots that produce nonconsensual pornography are common, but this particular bot is notable for amassing 115,016 users in just a few weeks and for making the bleeding edge of AI video generation cheap and easy to access for nefarious means. The bot’s popularity also shows how quickly “open” AI tools released by tech giants are being adopted to cause harm.
The size of the bot’s audience, and the rapid speed at which it grew, shows just how quickly abusive tools like this are spreading across Telegram and the communities that use them. It also shows how Telegram is one of the major platforms where this abuse takes place, despite this content technically violating its terms of service.
I found the bot promoted in a different Telegram channel dedicated to making and sharing AI-generated nonconsensual pornography which has about 50,000 members. As I previously reported, in late February the Chinese tech giant Alibaba released an open weights AI video generation model called Wan 2.1, which was quickly modified to create several AI video generation models dedicated to creating porn. About 24 hours after Alibaba released Wan 2.1, those porn AI models started appearing on Civitai, a site for sharing modified AI models that multiple 404 Media investigations have shown is widely used by people who create nonconsensual content.
As I reported in March, the users in the Telegram channel have been sharing nonconsensual AI videos created with a variety of apps that are available via the Apple App Store since 2024, but since Wan 2.1 was released, an increasing number of users in the Telegram channel have been sharing nonconsensual AI generated videos they say use modified Wan 2.1 models that are shared on Civitai.
AI-generated videos of men ejaculating on celebrity women’s faces have been particularly popular in the Telegram channel seemingly because they are easier to produce and more convincing. I’m not going to repeat every detail, but according to several users in the channel who shared instructions on how to create these videos, the process involves using a Civitai image-to-video AI model and running it locally or in the cloud. Image-to-video AI models allow users to feed a single still image to the model, then type a text prompt in order to animate that image how they like.
In mid-April, similar AI-generated videos started flooding the Telegram channel but with a watermark with a URL, registered April 18, that directed users to the Telegram bot that now has 115,016 users. Another Telegram channel with an almost identical name and logo was banned by Telegram sometime in April for violating its terms of service, but the bot was still active at the time of writing.
Users who join the bot’s Telegram channel get one free credit that allows them to generate one of these videos. All they have to do is upload a still image and the bot will generate it within minutes. When I tested it, my “queue position” was #172 and it took the bot 20 minutes to generate the video. Users can buy additional credits in packages which are cheaper the more credits they buy. Four credits cost $4.60, for example, while 240 credits cost $195. Users also get a 20 percent discount for paying in cryptocurrency.
Cumshot AI bots are an evolution of “tributes,” where people physically ejaculate on photographs of women and share videos of it online. Women who’ve been targeted by tributes have said they find it disturbing at its mildest and serious harassment and threatening at worst. Sometimes tributes escalate to threats of violence and rape.
I’m not sure exactly how the bot grew so fast in such a short time, but it’s notable that it is now almost double the size of the original Telegram channel where I found it. I’ve also found that videos with the watermark advertising it are hosted on a porn tube site where they have gained thousands of views, as well as another Telegram channel dedicated to creating nonconsensual AI-generated pornography of Korean pop stars. One user who uploaded these videos to a tube site also uploaded a couple of videos labeled as “highschool crushes,” explained that they were videos of women he knew in real life, and left instructions in the description of the video on how to find these women’s real Instagram accounts.
While nonconsensual AI-generated adult content violates Telegram’s policies, and while the company has taken action on such channels and bots before, they are still very common on the platform. I did a quick search while researching this article and found various such bots, including an “undress” bot with more than 170,000 monthly users.
Telegram and Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment.
Nach nur dreieinhalb Jahren verlässt Olaf Scholz das Kanzleramt - und wird heute mit einem großen Zapfenstreich verabschiedet. Doch ganz verschwinden wird er nicht. Typisch Scholz halt. Von Ruth Kirchner.[mehr]
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