Parents' fears as frightening porn trend imported from the US threatens to sweep through Australian schools

A new form of bullying is creeping into Australian schools as teens have started using AI technology to create naked images of their classmates. 

Police received reports of male students in the US using an AI-powered website to generate 'deepfake' pornographic images of their classmates using photos found online in early November.

The technology is now so advanced that some deepfakes are indistinguishable from reality, which has led to 'sextortion' among classmates. 

Students have been found threatening to release the photos online if they are not provided with money or sexual favours from a fellow student.

In Australia reports have started to emerge of teens doing the same to each other and in some cases even to their teachers. 

Australia's eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said that she had seen a growing number of complaints about pornographic deepfakes this year.

'eSafety has seen a small but growing number of complaints about explicit deepfakes since the beginning of the year through our image-based abuse scheme,' Ms Grant told news.com.au. 

'The rapid deployment, increasing sophistication and popular uptake of generative AI means it no longer takes vast amounts of computing power or masses of content to create convincing deepfakes.

'Deepfakes, especially deepfake pornography, can be devastating to the person whose image is hijacked and sinisterly altered without their knowledge or consent.' 

Ms Grant said that recent advancs in the technology has led to cybercriminals finding more ways to exploit it to create more convincing pictures. 

There is no easy way to combat sextortion, which can deny victims potential remedy.

However, the eSafety office has an 87 per cent success rate in systematically removing any deepfakes that have been uploaded to the internet when they are reported, according to Ms Grant. 

AI expert Anuska Bandara, who is based in Melbourne, claims that the recent spike in deepfake technologies can be tied to the advent of a program called AI hype in November 2022, which was followed by OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The danger of the technology lies in the fact that the victims are left powerless when they are threatened with fake naked pictures of themselves, according to Mr Bandara.

Scammers are also known to be fully taking advantage of the AI technology on people they have never even met.   

'The real individuals have no control over what deepfakes, created using advanced AI techniques, might communicate. Exploiting this technology, scammers are leveraging deepfakes to influence unsuspecting individuals, leading them into dangerous situations or even engaging in the distribution of explicit content,' he said.

Mr Bandara stressed the risks associated with uploading images online have compounded because of deepfakes, which makes it all the more important for people to make sure their accounts are private. 

AI technologies have been used by scammers in the past and have gone so far as to clone social media users' voices before calling their targets' parents and begging for cash. 

The so-called 'family emergency' scam can be achieved with as little as three seconds of audio, which can easily be extracted from a social media clip, to clone a person's voice, a McAfee study found. 

The same study also found that one in four respondents had some experience of AI voice scam and one in ten said they had been targeted personally.

Criminals typically request money be sent via a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin as they are untraceable and therefore limit the ability to track scammers down. 

Richard Mendelstein, a software engineer at Google, lost $4,000 after receiving a distressing phone call that appeared to be his daughter screaming for help.

He was then told by her 'kidnappers' to withdraw $4,000 in cash as a ransom payment.

Mendelstein sent the money to a wiring service in Mexico City and only later realized he had been scammed and that his daughter was safe at school.