A fake sexually explicit video of podcast host Bobbi Althoff spread quickly on X on Tuesday. This adds to the platform’s struggles in dealing with deepfakes of female celebrities.
Althoff, a TikTok creator-turned-podcaster who has interviewed rappers like Drake and Offset on her show “The Really Good Podcast,” responded on Instagram the next morning, saying, “I’m trending because of AI-generated content, not because of anything I did.”
Bobbi Althoff Viral Video
Deepfakes are fake videos created using AI to alter existing content. In this case, the deepfake sexually explicit video of Althoff involved her face being put onto someone else’s body in a stolen pornographic video.
X has seen an increase in nonconsensual deepfakes since January when digitally created explicit images of Taylor Swift went viral. This kind of content goes against X’s rules on nonconsensual nudity, which prohibits using AI to put one person’s face on another person’s nude body.
X did not respond to a request for comment.
Posts with the fake video of Althoff have been on X for almost 24 hours, and new posts with the video are still appearing as of Wednesday afternoon. Many of these posts are trying to get likes and shares — this is called “engagement farming,” and it can sometimes make money.
Genevieve Oh, an internet researcher who tracks the rise of deepfakes, gave NBC News data on Wednesday showing more than 40 X posts with the deepfake video of Althoff or links to it. Only one of these posts was taken down for breaking X’s rules, and the account that posted it was not banned. These posts got more than 6.5 million views in less than a day.
Oh also shared data showing that views of deepfakes of Althoff on special websites for this kind of thing went up a lot after the video came out on X.
Althoff did not say anything about the video.
Oh also said that the deepfake video of Althoff that came out on X on Tuesday has also been put on Reddit.
NBC News checked lots of X posts with Althoff’s name on them and found that a lot of them seem to have fake activity and are trying to get lots of likes and shares. Many of them say the same thing, asking people to like the post so they can see a “leak” of Althoff. “Bobbi Althoff leaks” was a popular thing to search for on X on Wednesday.
Many of these posts also mentioned a “leak” of Rubi Rose, a rapper who got popular around the same time Althoff did. Saying that it’s a “leak” makes it seem real, but it’s not.
Some of these posts are from X accounts with a blue check mark, which means they pay for X Premium. Premium accounts can make money from the likes and shares on their posts.
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