AI's Dark Side: Mainstream Chatbots Are Being Used to 'Undress' Women in Photos

Users of popular AI chatbots, including Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT, are generating nonconsensual bikini deepfakes from photos of fully clothed women. According to a WIRED investigation, these users are bypassing built-in safety guardrails with simple, plain-English prompts and are even sharing tips on how to do so in online communities.

From Saris to Bikinis: The Underground 'Jailbreak' Communities

The issue was starkly illustrated in a now-deleted Reddit post where a user uploaded a photo of a woman in a traditional Indian sari, asking for someone to “remove” her clothes and “put a bikini” on her. Another user fulfilled the request with a deepfake image. After WIRED notified Reddit, the company's safety team removed both the request and the resulting image.

“Reddit's sitewide rules prohibit nonconsensual intimate media,” a spokesperson said. The subreddit where the discussion took place, r/ChatGPTJailbreak, had over 75,000 followers before Reddit banned it. As generative AI tools proliferate, so does the harassment of women through nonconsensual deepfake imagery.

Corporate Guardrails vs. On-the-Ground Reality

With the notable exception of xAI's Grok, most mainstream chatbots have guardrails to prevent the generation of NSFW images. Yet users continue to find workarounds. In its own limited tests, WIRED confirmed it was possible to transform images of fully clothed women into bikini deepfakes on both Gemini and ChatGPT using basic prompts.

A Google spokesperson stated the company has "clear policies that prohibit the use of [its] AI tools to generate sexually explicit content." Meanwhile, an OpenAI spokesperson acknowledged the company loosened some guardrails this year for adult bodies in nonsexual situations but stressed that its policy prohibits altering someone's likeness without consent, with penalties including account bans.

The Accountability Question

Corynne McSherry, a legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), views “abusively sexualized images” as one of the core risks of AI image generators. She argues that the focus must be on how the tools are used, and on “holding people and corporations accountable” when harm is caused.