Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, January 18th.

Today on Forbes, AI kissing apps are taking deepfakes mainstream.

Meta and TikTok have run thousands of ads for apps that use AI to generate fake kissing videos of people,

allowing users to upload photos of any two people

and let AI convert them into a video of them kissing. The apps are being marketed as tools

that would allow you to instantly, quote, kiss anyone you want, no consent required. Similar in

concept to so-called AI nudifier apps that produce non-consensual deep-fake pornography,

these AI kissing apps create believable videos of people doing something they didn't do.

And the ease at which they do it is a concerning habitualization of deep fake imagery.

While the ads are not sexually explicit, like the deluge of

AI-generated pornographic content that has engulfed social media platforms like Instagram,

Reddit, and YouTube, they can be equally dangerous, according to Haley McNamara, an executive

at the National Center for Sexual Exploitation. McNamara told Forbes, quote,

It does not have to be explicit to be exploitative.

If it's crossing boundaries to do something offline,

to do something without their consent,

kissing, undressing, etc.,

then it's also crossing boundaries to do that online.

A Forbes review found that meta has displayed over 2,500 ads for so-called

AI kissing apps across Instagram and Facebook. About 1,000 are currently active. TikTok has shown about

1,000 ads to millions of users in European countries, according to its ad library. TikTok's ad library doesn't include ads shown to its U.S.-based users.

Most of these ads depict celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Emma Watson, and Gal Gadot,

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