San Francisco Shuts Down 10 Popular AI Porn Sites

In a move that’s about as subtle as a Stalinist agent embedding a pickaxe into Leon Trotsky’s brain, San Francisco’s city attorney announced a major ‘victory’ in its curious lawsuit against websites using AI to create explicit non-consensual images. No less than ten out of sixteen websites have been forcibly shut down, with City Attorney David Chiu declaring that these operators broke state and federal laws. San Francisco, the so-called ‘AI capital of the world,’ is now also the place where the city attorney thinks he can police the darkest corners of the internet and protect us all from AI-generated deepfake images.

Not only were NONE of the 16 sites based in San Francisco, NONE were even based in the USA.

‘We’re talking about the use of artificial intelligence to generate non-consensual pornography,’ Chiu said. The lawsuit targets sixteen website owners, accusing them of violating laws against deepfake pornography, revenge pornography, and child pornography. Ten of these sites are now officially kaput, and one defendant, Briver, has agreed to a settlement, paying a cool $100,000 in civil penalties and promising to stay out of the ‘business.’ Perhaps some of that $100K of Greenback will be spent on finally solving the city’s appalling homelessness problem.

These websites attracted a whopping 200 million visitors in the first half of 2024. Yet it appears that any city attorny in the US can erase them with a stroke of a pen. Sunny Liu, Director of Research at Stanford University’s Social Media Lab, thinks this lawsuit is a step in the right direction but admits there’s still plenty of work to do. ‘We don’t have a clear understanding of how prevalent they are, but the data shows that 6% of girls are being victimized,’ Liu said, because nothing says ‘data’ like a good old-fashioned survey.

State senators Josh Becker and Aisha Wahab have been busy creating legislation to combat this issue, acknowledging that AI is moving faster than policy. ‘We had to link and say, “Hey, there’s this new thing called AI, and AI-generated revenge pornography should be treated the same as revenge pornography,”

A huge part of this investigation was unmasking the individuals and corporations behind these sites. ‘We have unmasked a number of individuals and corporations that have been hiding their identities,’ Chiu said.

So, ten sites are down, but what about the other six? City Attorney Chiu assured us they’re still pursuing them, using methods like contacting companies that facilitated these crimes with their search engines or payment methods.

And there you have it! San Francisco’s latest triumph in the never-ending battle against AI-generated explicit images. Perhaps legislators will soon also wake up to the immanent threats posed by AI replacing all jobs, or the fact that many experts are saying that AI has a 30% chance of wiping out humanity in the next 10 years? Well, I guess the extinction of the planet would certainly solve the problem of men jerking off to Taylor Swift AI nudes. In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates from the front lines of the deepfake war!”