Watch this: We're not ready for the deepfake revolutionīut the bot's business strategy is also ambitious, inspired by strategies from gaming and classic promotional tropes. But 'paid premium' features include sending multiple pics, skipping the line of free users and removing watermarks from the pornographic images they get in return. It's the kind of user-friendly strategy that has helped legal, legitimate apps and games like Spotify and Fortnite become worldwide phenoms.Ībusers can use the bot free by sending photos to it one at a time, seemingly up to five a day. The bot is built with a 'freemium' business model, providing free users with a basic level of functionality and reserving advanced features for those who pay. In a statement, VK said it doesn't tolerate such content or links on its platform and blocks communities that distribute them.

Telegram and VK were both founded by Pavel Durov, sometimes referred to as Russia's Mark Zuckerberg. Telegram is used globally, but its roots are in Russia, and links to the Telegram bot posted on VK, Russia's dominant social network, are the most common way that abusers have found the bot. These members overwhelmingly come from Russia and former-USSR countries, about 70% of those surveyed. In July, that number had swelled to at least 24,168 images, according to Sensity.Īnd while deepfake pornography has long fixated on victimizing actresses, models and other celebrity women, 70% of this bot's targets were private individuals, according to a self-reported survey of the bot's users in Sensity's report.Ībout 100,000 people are members of channels linked to the bot, Sensity found. A year ago, about 1,000 images manipulated by the bot were posted in channels in a month. The bot's promotional website suggests that as many as 700,000 images have been manipulated by the bot.Īnd the bot is growing in popularity. 'But definitely we are talking about some multiplier of that 100,000.'

Sensity doesn't know the scope of material that is not shared, Patrini added. The 100,000-plus total number of images is limited to manipulated photos that were publicly posted and that Sensity was able to track down.

App that deepfakes nudes