Ads for AI sex workers are flooding Instagram and TikTok
Apps promising AI-generated sexual images and companionship are running hundreds of ads on social media. Human sex workers are often banned.
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Ads for AI sex workers are flooding Instagram and TikTok
Apps promising AI-generated sexual images and companionship are running hundreds of ads on social media. Human sex workers are often banned.Advertisements for sexualized chatbots are proliferating on social media.Leila Register / NBC News; Getty Images
Sept. 1, 2023, 8:14 AM EDT
By David Ingram
Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have tried to keep a tight lid on sexualized content in recent years, banning nudity outright in almost all cases, kicking off sex workers and even cracking down on some artists and educators who speak frankly about sexual health and safety.
But a new kind of sexualized content has lately been getting through their moderation systems: ads for scantily clad and dirty-talking chatbots, powered by what their creators say is artificial intelligence.
Dozens of tech startups have been running explicit advertisements on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook in recent months for apps that promote not-safe-for-work experiences. The ads promise “NSFW pics,” custom pinup girls and chats with “no censoring,” and many of them feature digitally created potential “girlfriends” with large breasts and tight clothing.
Some ads use memes that include popular children’s TV characters, such as SpongeBob SquarePants, Bart Simpson or Cookie Monster, to promote apps with which people can create “NSFW pics.” Others feature digitally created girls who appear to be teenagers or younger, sometimes in the style of anime.
An ad on Instagram for an “nsfw pics” app uses an image of Cookie Monster. Obtained by NBC News via Instagram
NBC News found 35 app developers running sexually explicit ads on apps owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The app developers were running more than 1,000 ads in all, many of them easily discoverable and viewable on Meta’s online library of ads, which the public has access to.
There were 14 app developers running hundreds more sexually provocative AI ads on TikTok, NBC News found. Some, but not all, were the same ads that appeared on Meta. It wasn’t clear, though, how many of them were seen in the U.S., because TikTok’s ads library provides transparency only for ads that appear in Europe. TikTok’s ad policies prohibit ads that “display or promote the use of prohibited adult products or services.”
Meta and TikTok post ad-related records in publicly accessible archives for transparency. There, they disclosed that they had removed some of the developers’ ads before NBC News contacted them, but not all of them. On TikTok, some ads got thousands of views and stayed up for weeks before TikTok removed them, according to its library.
The marketing push is part of an AI gold rush, in which app developers — most of them based abroad — are mining customers who are interested in sexual or romantic connections with custom digital characters. It's part of a larger movement to capitalize on a surge of interest in AI, following the popularity of tech startup OpenAI's ChatGPT product, which reset expectations for what AI chatbots were capable of.
Some researchers said the erotic AI apps are benefiting from a double standard that hurts real human sex workers.
“Sex workers are not allowed to make money off their image, but some tech bro who is creating a similar AI image is,” said Carolina Are, a research fellow at Northumbria University and the Centre for Digital Citizens in the United Kingdom.
AI apps are running erotic ads that human sex workers can’t, some researchers say. Obtained by NBC News via Instagram
The ads usually promote sexualized female characters. Are said she believes that reflects a gender-based slant — social media platforms freely allow sex-related ads only if the intended audience is men. The ad libraries from Meta and TikTok don’t always record the rejected or removed ads, so it’s hard to tell what ads have been moderated by the platforms, but searches for terms relating to virtual girlfriends, in general, yield a higher number of results than searches for terms relating to virtual boyfriends.
Meta and TikTok stepped up their removal of sexually explicit AI ads after NBC News contacted them Wednesday, but they didn’t answer questions about how the ads got through their filters in the first place.
Meta said in a statement that its ban on adult content applies equally to human-made and AI-generated content.
“Our policies prohibit ads containing adult content that is overly suggestive or sexually provocative — whether it’s AI-generated or not,” the company said. “Our policies and enforcement are designed to adapt in this highly adversarial space, and we are actively monitoring any new trends in AI-generated content.”
Meta also said it is reviewing its public-facing policies to ensure that the standard is clear.
TikTok confirmed in a statement that its policies prohibit sexually provocative ads and said it had removed examples shared by NBC News.