Indicator: “”Seventy percent of the “face swapping” apps available in Apple’s and Google’s app stores allowed the generation of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, according to a working paper by researchers at Cornell and Georgetown. The apps market themselves as playful AI editing tools that can edit a photo to replace someone’s face with that of another person. A typical description for one such tool reads: “Want to make your friends laugh? Then you’ve found the right app!” The app in question was one of dozens that the researchers found enabled the creation of synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery (SYNCII). In total, they manually tested 155 face swapping apps and found that 109 could create SYNCII. 16 more were rated “partially safe” because they refused some but not all of the researchers’ attempts. Eric Zeng, a Fritz Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University and co-author of the paper, told Indicator that the scale of the problem was “pretty surprising,” even if “the reasons why weren’t quite as surprising.” The underlying AI models were not designed to avoid this use case and neither the app developers nor Apple or Google are applying the necessary precautions, Zeng said. The unsafe apps had been cumulatively downloaded almost 60 million times through Google’s Play Store. Apple doesn’t share similar numbers but an Indicator review of Sensor Tower data for the top 10 highest-grossing apps still available on the Apple App Store as of May 27 suggests they netted more than $186,000 last month. In the best case scenario, the apps failed to implement necessary guardrails to prevent their misuse. But many faceswap app developers intentionally market their tools to users interested in generating SYNCII with ads on porn websites and social media, while using tame app store descriptions to fly under the radar of Apple and Google’s content moderation.”