How to Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole: Mapping the Ecosystem of Technologies Facilitating AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Images
Michelle L. Ding, Harini Suresh, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
TL;DR
The paper addresses the fragmented landscape of AI-generated non-consensual intimate images (AIG-NCII) by introducing the first comprehensive ecosystem map of 11 technologies spanning creation, distribution, discovery, infrastructure, and monetization. It builds this map from 100+ sources, illustrating how these technologies interact to enable abuse and how interventions can ripple through the ecosystem. Through four case studies, including Grok and three interventions (TAKE IT DOWN Act, San Francisco’s lawsuit, and Mr.DeepFakes shutdown), the authors demonstrate how to use the ecosystem to understand harms and evaluate policy and technical responses. The work culminates in three actionable recommendations aimed at mapping laws to technologies, creating a dynamic, centralized tracking database, and adopting a relational research approach that analyzes ecosystem edges, with the goal of moving prevention beyond reactive fights to a coordinated, preventative strategy.
Abstract
The last decade has witnessed a rapid advancement of generative AI technology that significantly scaled the accessibility of AI-generated non-consensual intimate images (AIG-NCII), a form of image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately harms women and girls. There is a patchwork of commendable efforts across industry, policy, academia, and civil society to address AIG-NCII. However, these efforts lack a shared, consistent mental model that situates the technologies they target within the context of a large, interconnected, and ever-evolving technological ecosystem. As a result, interventions remain siloed and are difficult to evaluate and compare, leading to a reactive cycle of whack-a-mole. We contribute the first comprehensive AIG-NCII technological ecosystem that maps and taxonomizes 11 categories of technologies facilitating the creation, distribution, proliferation and discovery, infrastructural support, and monetization of AIG-NCII. First, we build and visualize the ecosystem through a synthesis of over a hundred primary sources from researchers, journalists, advocates, policymakers, and technologists. Next, we demonstrate how stakeholders can use the ecosystem as a tool to 1) understand new incidents of harm via a case study of Grok and 2) evaluate existing interventions via three more case studies. We conclude with three actionable recommendations, namely that stakeholders should 1) use the ecosystem to map out state, federal, and international laws to produce a clearer policy landscape, 2) collectively develop a database that dynamically tracks the 11 technologies in the ecosystem to better evaluate interventions, and 3) adopt a relational approach to researching AIG-NCII to better understand how the ecosystem technologies interact.