Hey there, just a quick note, this episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual imagery involving minors. So please keep that in mind before listening.

This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemitabasu. Today, how the victims of a deep fake porn scandal fought back.

In the early spring of 2020, a small, quiet Long Island suburb called Levittown was hit by a scandal the town never

saw coming. It all started shortly after the pandemic lockdowns when a recent high school

graduate named Kayla was at her parents' house and her father, a police officer, came up to her

room. He always knocks on the door. So he knocked and just like walked right in. I thought

automatically, like, I was in trouble or something. But then I could just like tell like he was just

confused. He held out his phone and showed Kayla a photo of herself, a photo that she remembered

taking in her friend's backyard wearing a bathing suit, except...

I didn't have a bathing suit on anymore.

And it was just me naked.

Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts.

Her dad had found dozens of pornographic images of his daughter, and they looked incredibly

real.

She realized that some form of AI or technology had undressed her, and someone had manipulated

the image in that way, and then decided to post it on this very graphic, very disturbing website where users

were ranking what they wanted to do to her sexually.

That's Olivia Carville, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg.

She and her colleague, cybersecurity reporter Margie Murphy, went to Levittown to cover

this story because it wasn't just Kayla. By the end of

2020, several of Kayla's former classmates discovered manipulated images of themselves on this one

website too. All told, photos of over 40 young women, all alumni of the same high school,

...