Meta’s website advertising libraries shows the organization is hosting hundreds of ads for AI- generated, NSFW partner or “girlfriend” apps on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. They use NSFW chat samples and AI to show images of half clothed, utterly shaped, simulated women and offer sexually explicit images and texts.
Many of the digital women seen in adverts reviewed by WIRED are lifelike—if fairly uncanny—young, and characteristically sexual. Prospective buyers are invited to interact with an AI” stepmom,” communicate with a computer-generated teen wearing a dress, or converse with characters who promise to “get you off in a minute” in virtual reality.
Despite Meta’s campaign policies plainly prohibiting “adult content,” including “depictions of citizens in obvious or suggestive jobs, or actions that are excessively suggestive or sexually provocative,” the ads appear to be thriving.
That’s given debates about the conflict between AI and regular work a new face. Some people sex workers complain that Meta badly blocks their older occupation from its platforms by over-enforcing rules about grownup content, while allowing chatbots to grow.
” As a sexual employee, if I put something like’ I will do anything for you, I may make you come in a minute ‘ I do get deleted in an instant”, says Gemma Rose, director of the Pole Dance Stripper Movement, a UK- based sex- worker rights and pole- dance event organization.
Users are prohibited from selling sex, including sexting, or showing nudity or having sexual relations with anyone, according to Meta’s policies. Rosen and other pro-sex workers claim that the company seems to use a double standard when allowing chatbot apps to promote NSFW experiences while forbidding human sex workers from doing the same.
People who post about sex education, sex positivity, or sex work have for years complained the platform unfairly quashes their content. Meta has limited some of Rose’s posts from being shown to non- followers, screenshots seen by WIRED show. Both her personal Instagram account and one for her organization have previously been suspended for violating Meta guidelines.
” Not that I agree with a lot of the community guidelines and rules and regulations, but these]ads ] blatantly go against their own policies”, says Rose of the sexual chatbots promoted on Meta platforms. Yet we are not permitted to use the internet for entertainment or simply to exist and make a living.
WIRED surveyed chatbot ads using Meta’s ad library, a transparency tool that can be used to see all the ads currently running across its platforms, all ads shown in the EU in the past year, and past ads from the past seven years related to elections, politics, or social issues. Searches showed that at least 29, 000 ads had been published on Meta platforms for explicit AI “girlfriends”, with most using suggestive, sex- related messaging. There were also at least 19, 000 ads using the term” NSFW” and 14, 000 offering” NSFW AI”.
When WIRED contacted Meta last week, about 2,700 ads were active. A few days later, Meta’s Ryan Daniels, a Meta spokesman, announced that the company no longer reviews and removes ads that violate its guidelines. ” When we identify violating ads we work quickly to remove them, as we’re doing here”, he said. ” We keep improving our systems, including how we detect ads and behaviors that conflict with our policies,” he said.
However, 3, 000 ads for” AI girlfriends” and 1, 100 containing” NSFW” were live on April 23, according to Meta’s ad library.
WIRED’s initial review found that Hush, an AI girlfriend app downloaded more than 100, 000 times from Google’s Play store, had published 1, 700 ads across Meta platforms, several of which promise” NSFW” chats and” secret photos” from a range of lifelike female characters, anime women, and cartoon animals.
One shows an AI woman locked into medieval prison stocks by the neck and wrists, pledging,” Help me, I will do anything for you”. Another advertisement features an anime character and the phrase” Want to see more of NSFW pics” and is targeted at men aged 18 to 65.
Several of the 980 Meta ads for the “personalized AI companion” app Rosytalk feature round-the-clock chats with very young AI-generated women that WIRED discovered. They used tags including” #barelylegal”, “#goodgirls”, and “teens”. Rosytalk also ran 990 ads under at least nine brand names on Meta platforms, including Rosygirl, Rosy Role Play Chat, and AI Chat GPT.
At least 13 other apps for AI “girlfriends” have promoted similar services in Meta ads, including “nudifying” features that allow a user to “undress” their AI girlfriend and download the images. A few girlfriend advertisements had already been removed because they had broken Meta’s advertising standards. ” Undressing” apps have also been marketed on mainstream social platforms, according to social media research firm Graphika, and on Linked In, the Daily Mail recently reported.
Some users of the so-called AI companions claim they can combat loneliness, while others claim they feel like real partners. Some of the advertisements suggested an explicit AI chatbot could provide emotional support, while others that were discovered by WIRED only promote titillation. ” Talk to anyone! You’re not alone”! reads one of Hush’s ads on Meta platforms.
Human sex workers, according to Carolina Are, an innovation fellow at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University in the UK, provide for lonely and disabled people by catering to their needs and desires. However, according to her, Meta makes it very difficult for them to run campaigns on its platforms.
Are, who has assisted sex workers reactivate lost and unfairly suspended accounts on Meta platforms, says,” When people are trying to work through and profit off their own body, they are forbidden.” While AI companies that are primarily driven by bros that can exploit existing images can do that.
Are the sexually suggestive AI girlfriends allegedly reminiscent of the ilk and generic early days of internet porn? ” Sex workers engage with their customers, subscribers, and followers in a way that is more personalized”, she says. Beyond the sharing of naked images, this is a lot of work and emotional labor.
There is little known about how the AI apps are created or how the underlying text or image-generation algorithms are trained. One used the name Sora, apparently to suggest a connection to OpenAI’s video generator of that name, which has not been publicly released.
The developers behind the apps that promote explicit AI girlfriends are questionable. None of the developers who are credited with creating the apps promoted on Meta’s platforms responded to inquiries for comment on Google Play or Facebook.
Mike Stabile, director of public affairs at the Free Speech Coalition, an adult- industry nonprofit trade association, sees the apps promising explicit AI girlfriends and their advertising tactics as “scammy”. While the adult industry is banned from advertising online, AI apps are “flooding the zone”, he says. The paradox of censorship is that you end up deceiving an actual sex worker and allowing all these marijuana to flourish there.
FOSTA- SESTA, an anti-sex-trafficking law passed into US law in 2018, made platforms accountable for what is posted online, vastly restricting adult content. Consensual sex work was treated as trafficking in the digital world, preventing adult content creators from entering the online world and making already underrepresented sex workers more vulnerable.
If Meta removes the artificial girlfriend ads from its platforms, it could imitate previous sex workers ‘ efforts. Despite diligently trying to follow Meta’s guidelines, the Pole Dance Stripper Movement’s account was banned “without warning” during a wave of removals of at least 45 sexuality- related accounts in June 2023, Rose says. Meta eventually rolled back some of the deletions, citing an error. But for sex workers on social media, such events are a recurring feature.
Rose’s personal account and its backup were also deleted in June 2021 during the Covid pandemic after she shared a photo, she says, of a pole- dancing workshop. At the time, she was promoting the adult-only pole-dance website OnlyFans and hosting online pole-dancing classes. ” My business was gone overnight”, she says. ” I did n’t have a way to sustain myself”.
” OK, so I got deleted”, Rose adds. However, these businesses are permitted to produce this kind of shit that sex workers are n’t permitted to? It makes no sense”.
