AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

The UK's online regulator has lobbed a £50,000 fine at an AI nudification website for failing to implement mandatory age checks, potentially allowing under-18s to waltz past the virtual velvet rope. Ofcom said that Itai Tech Ltd – operator of the site Undress.cc, an AI-powered service that takes real photos and spits out fake …

[Hubert Cumberdale]

So... the watchdog snaps ineffectively at a site with no lock on the front door while 90% of kids just use a VPN to sneak in round the back...

[Anonymous Coward]

NippleWatch er sorry Ofcom are playing whack-a-mole with the small fry, while studiously ignoring the elephants in the room. Performative Politics at its most cynical. At least the Aussies are aiming at the right targets.

[Blitheringeejit]

This

Of course all this was predictable from the moment the Act was drafted - but I still struggle to understand why legislators think age verification is a better approach to protecting the vulnerable than making the big platforms bear some legal liability for the content they host, like newspapers and TV channels do (in theory). Of course that would rapidly result in Twitter, Facebook et al disappearing from the UK internets - but that in itself would be an interesting social experiment.

Rather like the social experiment we've been conducting for the last two decades by allowing them to operate unregulated...

[may_i]

Re: This

Maybe you still remember the original idea of the World Wide Web?

Anyone who had a connection to the Internet could set up a web server at their address and publish whatever they felt like, to the entire planet, for nothing. The ultimate free press.

Then people wanted to make money from what they were publishing. But it was difficult to arrange payment from other people who liked the content. The advertising industry smelled blood in the bitstreams.

Now the evolution of the web has nearly reached peak shittification. Corporations have taken over. Always trying to entice more users to their platforms to boost their ad incomes. They treat their users as mere data sources to be mined, classified, enriched, bought and sold. Google makes a fortune from the content created by people on YouTube, but shares less and less each year with the people who create the content which drives their business. YouTube is now overflowing with scams, AI slop and comment bots selling sex sites. Millions of discussions are locked away inside systems like Facebook where other people can never learn from them or join in if they are not prepared to give their soul to Zuckerberg. The previous dream of an open, free press has been coerced by greed into a monster which resembles cable TV more and more with each passing year.

The involvement of incompetent politicians and their hidden agendas with regulating any aspect of the web means the kiss of death to any ideas we may once have had of the Internet democratising and uniting the world. Now it's more used to spread click-bait, disinformation and propaganda. Plus for tracking individuals' lives and opinions in fine detail and building detailed profiles of them and their social connections for sale to the highest bidder. People are imprisoned for what they have said on the Internet. Karens all over the world demand that governments regulate the Internet until nobody can see any words or images which they might even remotely find offensive. They want to turn it into a children's toy.

The thing we call the World Wide Web today is just a mere shadow of what it could have been. It will get a lot worse. Humans collectively appear to be incapable of acting rationally. So has it always been.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: This

In your utopian free internet, would the site in this case be free to operate unhindered?

[may_i]

Re: This

Probably.

Let's face it, the technology to create images from a prompt via a diffusion model exists. Like with all Pandora's Boxes, once they have been opened, they cannot be closed. Trying to put things back in the box and close it again is a childish and pointless action.

What would you do? Attempt to make creating images that show nudity illegal? Where do paintings or other purely human created images fit in your proposed legislation? Where does a lot of pre-existing art fit? The only people who object to nudity are prudes or people who have their thinking constrained by religious dogma.

If someone wants to create a nude image of a person, they are welcome to do that with a technology which cannot be un-invented. They are also welcome to create such images completely manually with paints and a brush. The problem with such images comes after they have been created with how that image is subsequently used.

Adequate laws already exist to prosecute and punish someone who attempts to slander, libel or make false accusations against someone else, be it via words or images. So, instead of trying to ban a technology, prosecute people who use images created by the site in question in an illegal manner.

[Blitheringeejit]

Re: This

>Adequate laws already exist

But they are not adequate for addressing this issue.

Those laws date from a time when the only people with significant audience reach were identifiable and prosecutable. It was always possible to work around the restrictions using technology - I'm old enough to remember Radio Moscow and the Voice of America - but they didn't have easy access to a mainstream audience in the UK. All media which DID have access to such an audience fell within UK legal jurisdiction, and could be prosecuted under the libel and slander laws. So they were careful not to publish anything which could be prosecutable under those laws.

But now the platforms with huge mainstream audiences aren't held legally liable for everything which people post on their platforms, so that legislation doesn't work. The posters are anonymous and UK law has no way to compel the platform to reveal their identity - and even if they did, the posters themselves may well be operating outside UK legal jurisdiction.

I'm guessing this reality is one reason why you think that there's no point in trying to legislate for any regulation on the web, and there's merit in that argument. Certainly nothing which the legislators have considered or implemented so far comes close to making a real difference - they just want to be seen to be doing something.

But the damage done to the young and the vulnerable (not to mention anyone in the public eye) by an unregulated, profit-driven web is devastating, and deeply damaging to social cohesion and consensus politics. And as far as I can tell, the only reason why the platforms are not liable for all their content in the UK is because of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, a directive (not a piece of UK legislation) designed to protect customers of e-commerce businesses.

That's why I think it's time for a good hard re-examination of this legal landscape. The thing is, it's pretty clear that any attempt to make the platforms liable in the UK would just result in them shutting themselves down, or being forcibly shut down, as mass audience entities here. Which brings us back to my original point - is the benefit they bring worth the damage they do? You can imagine the public outcry if the government tried to take their Facebook and Twitter away - but one key purpose of government in a civilised society is to protect the weak and vulnerable from the strong and rich. So I think it's worth a shot.

But that's easy for me to say because I don't use any of the platforms - I do most of my shouting-in-my-bedroom (see icon!) here on El Reg. :)

[may_i]

Re: This

Oh boy. An actual argument! How nice.

Here goes then...

> But they are not adequate for addressing this issue. (and your next paragraph).

These are merely assertions. Young people here in Sweden are regularly prosecuted and punished for "revenge porn" and similar criminal acts. I'm sure the same happens in the UK. If someone takes either a real picture or an AI picture of someone who is nude or having sex and spreads that picture to others, existing laws are perfectly usable to help dissuade people from repeating the exercise. You have presented nothing other than assertions that this isn't the case. Therefore I think you should try harder and give me examples of how the law in the UK has failed to deliver redress to people who have been affected by the publication of real or LLM created images.

> But now the platforms with huge mainstream audiences aren't held legally liable for everything which people post on their platforms, so that legislation doesn't work.

This is nonsense. The people who should be responsible for what they post on the Internet are the people who originate the posting! Pertinent to that, see below:

> The posters are anonymous and UK law has no way to compel the platform to reveal their identity - and even if they did, the posters themselves may well be operating outside UK legal jurisdiction.

Unless someone posts something to a darknet site via TOR, nobody is anonymous on the Internet, particularly in the UK, which has the most pervasive surveillance of Internet users in all of Europe. People in the UK are regularly prosecuted for posting "hate speech" to sites like Facebook. Everything you do, everyone you talk to, every message or picture you post and everything you read from within the UK is stored and indexed at GCHQ. I very much doubt that the UK authorities even need to ask X, Facebook, Google or any other service who posted what as they already have that information. Regardless of that, US authorities and companies respond immediately to UK law enforcement requests for user identities, just as the UK responds to their US counterparts.

The rest of your post seems to confuse parental responsibility with government regulation. I agree with you that the platforms which have grown from the greedy expansion of the advertising and profiling businesses' rise has been harmful. It has concentrated power into a few companies who are only interested in how many advertising views they get.

However, you appear to be on the side of giving politicians the right to decide who is allowed to speak and what they are allowed to say.

I'm an old fart, just like you, and it scares me that someone who should know better is prepared to hand people's privacy and right to free and unmonitored communication to politicians who he should know better than to trust.

[Eric 9001]

Re: This

Btw, it was never "TOR" - it's Tor.

You're pretty anonymous with Tor even if you use exit relays as long as you don't go posting personal information - as the website only sees the exit IP addresses - although many sites block posting via tor and many sites that allow posting via tor like facebook require effectively doxing yourself to get an account.

[Blitheringeejit]

Re: This

>Oh boy. An actual argument! How nice....

>These are merely assertions.

How nice to find someone who still thinks an argument on the internet should be conducted using evidence! :) But I'm unsure what you would accept as evidence - I could support my points with links to press and broadcast news articles, but such things carry little weight when it's so easy to find opposing opinions. I happen to believe most of what I see on the BBC and Channel4 news and read in the Guardian, but many of my countrymen would regard these sources as hopelessly biased and representative of vested interests which they do not share - and would direct you instead to output from Reform UK politicians and broadcasters like GB News. Evidence is so last-century - if it were still a viable concept, Britain would never have left the EU in 2016, or lost so many souls in the pandemic. And on it goes...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation

Never mind the Anthropocene epoch - I think we're now living in the Influenceocene.

But public sources of evidence aside, I do have friends who have direct experience of (as examples) our current difficulties with prosecuting even the most blatant criminality, and delivering parenting and/or education which counteracts the influence of folks like Andrew Tate on adolescent boys - and these folks regard their situations as desperate. You say you're sure that we prosecute online offenders just as Sweden does - but prosecuting criminals requires a functional police force and judiciary. Swedes pay enough tax to afford such luxuries, but we Brits pay far less, and have been told for decades by politicians of both our main parties that we can have better public services without tax rises. The result is that proposing tax rises to improve public services renders a British political party unelectable, and our judicial and policing systems are among the casualties of this generation-long fairytale. Feel free to research for yourself the average time it takes to bring a rape case to court in the UK - having laws is one thing, but having the resources to enforce them is very much another.

But the central point which you don't seem to have answered is that of most perpetrators being beyond the reach of our justice system. Maybe this isn't so much of a problem in Sweden, given the language situation - perhaps most of those who groom and abuse Swedish kids online (or indeed drive them to suicide) are Swedish themselves, and your law enforcement can get to them. But however powerful our surveillance, and even if we do make a decently-resourced effort to find and prosecute UK-based abusers (citation needed), there's nothing we can do to stop the rest of the English-speaking world from abusing and corrupting our vulnerable and our kids via the platforms. Hence my thought-experiment that the only way to protect our people is to close off those platforms - or at least make them legally and financially liable for the damage that is done using them, which will scare them off in short order. I agree that the posters *should* be the ones paying the price - but it's the platforms who (by failing to mediate their content and allowing posters to remain anonymous) have decided that this shall not be the case, and they are answerable for that.

Of course it is just a thought-experiment, and I'm really not expecting anything like this to happen - if politicians can't sell the idea of raising taxes to improve the public services that we increasingly despair of, there's no way they will sell the idea of regulating the platforms. As a parallel example - I've been shouting in my bedroom about carbon emissions since the 1980s, so I know what a waste of energy this kind of ranting is, and how hopeless is the prognosis for the species. And compared to the current situations with climate change and war elsewhere in the world (but getting closer!), I suppose anyone who worries about a few damaged or dead British kids is just being parochial.

Best just take another one of my tablets, and focus on growing my vegetables and brewing my <icon>.

[may_i]

Re: This

I didn't answer your claim that companies like Facebook refuse to identify a person behaving illegally on their platform because it simply isn't true!

The fact that the UK has a barely functional police force is not a problem which should become the responsibility of a foreign company.

The responsibility for protecting children on the Internet starts with the child's parents, just like it does in society in general. If you don't know what your children are doing with either their computers or smartphones on the Internet, you are an irresponsible parent. If a parent, through their lack of responsibility, allows their child to come to harm on the Internet, it is they who are neglectful. People who are incapable of taking care of their children should have them taken away from them if they repeatedly fail to live up to that responsibility. The same applies if you allow your children to act criminally in general. The packs of feral children found in some of the most depressed areas in the UK are a result of the parents not giving a shit about what their children are up to when they are outside the house or giving them any education regarding what is expected of them.

There is far too much talk these days of things being "someone else's problem" and about "something must be done". If your children are following monsters like the Tate brothers and you are not aware of this, then as a parent you have failed. Searching for someone else to blame for this is called refusing to take responsibility. Demanding that laws are passed to cover the fact that you can't be bothered helping your children to grow up as respectful and well adjusted members of society is just making excuses for your lack of responsibility.

Your entire approach here seems to be focussed on allowing parents to abdicate their responsibilities and expecting the government to take over. This is the wrong approach. More personal responsibility and real consequences for those who fail to discharge their responsibilities to their children is what is required, not the government over-regulating things which they can hardly understand to start with.

[Blitheringeejit]

Re: This

>The fact that the UK has a barely functional police force is not a problem which should become the responsibility of a foreign company.

I'm not suggesting making it their responsibility - I'm just suggesting that we take whatever steps we can to reduce the harm which results. The corollary is - it's not our government's responsibility to ensure that foreign companies are able to make huge profits by deploying systems and algorithms whose use results in harm to our vulnerable citizens and children. We also ban civilians from purchasing firearms, which I'm sure damages the profits of weapons manufacturers...

The irony is - I agree with most of your points, as matters of principle. Moreover - far from allowing parents to abdicate their responsibilities and expecting the government to take over, I have long maintained (mostly privately!) that people should be required to pass some kind of qualification in parenting before being allowed to propagate. I guess you would consider that to be over-regulation by the state too - but what I've been trying to address throughout this exchange is the fact that sometimes things do not work as they should, that sometimes people do not discharge their responsibilities to their community and their society as they ought (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd67e15e873o), and that serious and fatal harm is being done as a result. Of course it always has, but not at the scale it is being done here and now - and that shift is because of (or at least exacerbated by) the platforms.

Also - I completely accept that our combination of circumstances is a specifically British one, and at no point have I tried to prescribe a solution for other countries. Generally I'm a libertarian, and not in favour of governments dictating how people should think and behave. I just want to see less harm done here - and breaking the local business model of for-profit US multinationals seems like a possible route to harm reduction, and a small price to pay.

My own recollections of childhood in the 60 and 70s was that most of the people I knew were fine, but there were a few kids who were dangerous to themselves and others - and of course this was because of poor or absent parenting (perhaps, in some cases, combined with a poor understanding of neurodiversity). It's a problem which has always been with us - but the existence of the influencing platforms (and of services like the nudification site which started this whole thing off) can empower and transform these aberrant individuals into monetised mass-appeal social wrecking-balls.

It seems you are not keen on the government trying to regulate things they they can hardly understand - yet you seem to expect parents to do exactly that, and presumably to be sanctioned by that same government if they fail. I'm not sure I see the logic of that - governments come and go, but removing children from their parents and taking them into state care is a drastic and massively costly exercise, which historically has often failed to protect vulnerable children in the UK (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/29/how-did-childrens-homes-become-centres-of-profit-making-and-abuse) - though that picture is not universally bleak (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/17/the-guardian-view-on-the-care-experience-looked-after-children-and-care-leavers-must-be-heard).

Full disclosure - I decided early on that parenting wasn't for me, and have been careful (and occasionally fortunate!) to avoid it. This makes me slightly uncomfortable about telling people how they should do things that I have no idea how to do myself.

[elaar]

Re: This

" So, instead of trying to ban a technology"

There's a big difference between banning a technology, and not letting minors having easy access to it.

How easy do you think it is for children to access thousands of photo-quality nude paintings? Great comparison that one....

It would have been nice if my 8 year old daughter could have got a few photos of Taylor Swift from google search (with the safety filter on) a few weeks back, without encoutering a photo of 2 men banging her from behind. With all of this technology, it would be great if we could make it slightly less difficult for young children to see that sort of thing....

[FIA]

Re: This

Humans collectively appear to be incapable of acting rationally. So has it always been.

We'd need to agree on a definition of 'rational' first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This

"Humans collectively appear to be incapable of <vitually anything you can think of>"

The problem is the little word 'collectively' ... as the crowd of Humans scales up the collective IQ drops along with concern for 'others' !!!

Crowds of Humans are Tribal, brutish and lacking in finesse (in the most positive meaning of the word finesse).

'Group think' takes over and 'leaders' do all the thinking while the masses do all the running around and howling at the moon !!!

The people who shout the loudest are not always the same as the people who are right ... as taught by years of Social Media.

There is a global regression taking place where Tribal ways are becoming more prevalent and it is being used by groups to override old ideas of what is right and fair.

We are no longer respecting the things that promote the best of us and are falling under the spell of the people who shout the loudest, people who are only interested in what lines their own pockets and promotes their own position & power in the world, as they see it !!!

We are on a path where we will learn, once again, what 'regret' means.

A time of dictators, mad men, self-promoting 'leaders' (Political and Commercial) ... people who know what 'They' want and are prepared to 'walk over us all' to get it !!!

:)

[may_i]

Re: This

Thanks. That was exactly what I meant with "Humans collectively appear to be incapable of acting rationally."

It's easy to accuse our fellow commentards in the USA of being blithering idiots for voting the mad orange king in for a second round of destruction, but I'd rather just ascribe this to the crowd being easy to manipulate. Maybe if we educated our children in the fine art of critical reasoning, the world would move forwards...

[FIA]

Re: This

Ironically, it was also what I meant by 'define rational'.

Not one of the groups would, if challenged, ascribe their views to anything other than rationality. It's not mass stupidity, as you say it's an object lesson in psychology.

Maybe if we educated our children in the fine art of critical reasoning, the world would move forwards...

Has that changed, or are you just more exposed to the offspring of the people who didn't now?

Maybe we need to work out how to give weight to voices again? It has become too easy to be heard without having to give weight or any thought to your argument.

When I was a kid if I wanted to express an opinion to the wider world I would have to write a letter to the paper or a TV show (at the least), or actually become a trained journalist and publish an opinion piece.

Both of these methods of expression would pass my thoughts through several layers of sanity filtering. Now I just post my toxic views on Twitter.

Democratization of publication has been a boon, but also a society changing curse. How you'd go about fixing it without trampling on peoples right to self expression though I don't have a clue.

[may_i]

Re: This

I assume you have not read Asimov's Foundation Trilogy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This

I am the :) Anonymous Coward, and you know what assume does !!!

I have read the Foundation Trilogy [all 7 of them :) ] and it was a wonderful story but reality got in the way as I grew older.

It 'plucks' the same 'strings' as 'AI', trying to feed a psychological want BUT cannot actually be done.

BTW:

Does an 'Ass' substitute for a 'Mule ???

We most definitely have an 'Ass' or two in the world ... doing the world no good as per the story !!!

(I leave it as an exercise for the reader to identify the 'Asses' we appreciate so much each and every day !!!)

:)

[graemep]

Re: This

The reasons legislators think like that:

1. the experts (i.e. the big businesses like Twitter and FB) told them this was a better approach

2. both the big businesses and the government want to be able to identify people to better track what they do online so they want age verification as a way to slip in identity verification

3. the people with age verification products to sell told them it was the best approach.

There are lots of other approaches. For example providing filtered SIMS (which already exist) and routers with blocking options so you can turn it off for adults and on for kids devices. The technology exists and is a lot more solid than age verification. There will be ways past it but they can be difficult enough to at least protect most, especially young kids.

Some of these things probably should be illegal. How is nudification that different from upskirting which is illegal? I can understand a provider failing to stop bad uses for a product but these people are selling it as a nudification service.

[elaar]

VPN usage with children was estimated to be about 8% last time I looked. Maybe 90% if your sample data consists solely of teenage boys in the 14-18 category

[Hubert Cumberdale]

"VPN usage with children was estimated to be about 8% last time I looked"

I'm guessing that would have been before age verification came in.

"Maybe 90% if your sample data consists solely of teenage boys in the 14-18 category"

Well, yes. That would be the target demographic. But if a kid of any age is looking for pr0n, they're going to find it, and sooner rather than later. A simple image search with SafeSearch turned off will get you there in seconds (so to speak).

[Inkey]

Yeah that's what i have been saying ... would love to see ofcon .... go toe to toe with google et al ...

"highly effective age assurance" yeah right ...

More like

Highly ineffective goverment window dressing...

[IGotOut]

"VPN usage with children was estimated to be about 8% last time I looked"

Where's that survey?

I only ask if it includes the ages 0 - 18 it's going to have very, very different results to 13 -18.

Also how do they actually know? Ask 10 children if they use a VPN and extrapolate from that?

My teenage kids freely admit they use VPNs to bypass school internet restrictions, along with geoblockiing.

Never trust kids to give the truth to surveys. As I've spoken to both my kids, if you believe the school ground talk, every teenage boy has had sex with at least 10 girls, yet every girl is a virgin.

[steviesteveo]

It's also a service that should clearly be worrying about the age of the people in the source photos just as much as the age of the users but, for some reason, that's not a concern for ofcom

[vekkq]

"highly effective age assurance"

beats me where you could possibly find something like that.

[KittenHuffer]

And so it begins .....

Minister 1 - Something must be done about this!

Minister 2 - But we are doing something about this!

Minister 1 - Why can't I get to my tractor website then?

[David 132]

Re: And so it begins .....

Sounds like the punchline to the old joke about the farmer caught in flagrante with his Massey Ferguson, after his marriage guidance counsellor told him that to win his wife's affections back, he should "act sexy to attract 'er"

(Yes, it's a joke that works better spoken than in print...)

[David Austin]

Undress.cc

I mean, yeah, sure; fines, offcom, online safety act and all that..

I'm more concerned about the service undress.cc operates; that sounds like it's ripe for misuse, both in a generate blackmail material way, and a "Maybe checking the output is not underage is more important than the input" kind of way.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Undress.cc

Perhaps prohibiting the type of service† it offers might make more sense.

† Using an image of a clothed adult (99% female ?) and grafting a vaguely feasible naked body on to that image.

Hard to see a "legitimate" use. The non·consensual use of an image is nothing if not plain rude.

If consensual she could just as easily get her kit off and snap away.

Personally don't see the point and do wonder how many time Maggie Thatcher etc has been disrobed as a joke or to give the hard right of the Tories their jollies. Suella on the other hand would require a braver man than they can boast.

[steviesteveo]

Re: Undress.cc

It fundamentally is only a service for non consensual use.

Ofcom looks ridiculous for only enforcing this one side issue

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Undress.cc

Agreed. The fine should have been for existing and a few ordersof magnitude greater.

[Mr Tinkle]

Re: Undress.cc

And add to that it being a total waste of electrical power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Undress.cc

I'd not heard of this site before. £55K is probably money well spent from the advertising budget.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Bet the fines will go nowhere

Had a quick search, suspecting that Itai Tech Ltd would be an overseas company and Ofcom could go whistle for the fine.

Actually there is a UK based Itai Tech Ltd! However it is also in a state of 'Active proposal to strike off' according to Companies House, so Ofcom can still go whistle once they're wound up, I imagine.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Bet the fines will go nowhere

If it's in the process of being struck off and theirs a fine against it then it may well be that the striking off can be suspended until the fine is paid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bet the fines will go nowhere

I highly doubt there’s any money in the company account. Theoretically it’s sometimes possible to get behind the ltd co and go for the directors but this is unlikely.

[elsergiovolador]

Big picture

I think people are missing the big picture here.

The ultimate goal of this is to make people arrive at conclusion that Digital ID would have solved this.

Basically corrupt government is manufacturing consent through "nudge" policies.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Big picture

"consent through "nudge" policies."

I somehow misread that as "nudage" policies.

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Big picture

Candid photography. Know what I mean, nudge nudge.

[shane fitzgerald]

Re: Big picture

Say no more, saaay no more..

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Big picture

Could you walk that one through in greater detail. There seem to be a few steps missing in the logic.

[andy gibson]

Keep your AI and digital trickery, I'll continue to do it old-school:

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S12E19/458750

[Jamie Jones]

Even older school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_specs

[An_Old_Dog]

I Double Dog-Dare You

... to go to undress.cc and upload an image of Chewbacca the Wookie!

[Jedit]

"upload an image of Chewbacca the Wookie"

New strip poker strategy, Artoo: let the Wookiee win.

[Sandtitz]

Re: I Double Dog-Dare You

Chewbacca?

The holiday special season is here, so it should be Chewie's wife Malla. Just no Brazilian job, thank you!

[Czrly]

What about Consent?

This is so evil because the heart of the matter should be consent and not age. Age verification serves only to validate that a person is old enough to knowingly *grant* consent – that's why it's called the age of consent! Age verification only protects ONE (albeit extremely vulnerable) class of victim and this outcome does nothing to stem the vile tide of exploitation in general, in a wider sense.

In order for these sites to exist *at all*, ethically, they would need to be mandated (and forced) to prove genuine consent of every class of every category of person involved in the production and consumption of their bile: the users, the subjects in the prompts and every single human being featuring in their training data – none of whom are ever disclosed.

In reality: there simply is no way that this could be done properly and so the only outcome I find conscionable is the complete shut-down and blanket ban of such sites – not a pocket-change fine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about Consent?

You speak as though teenage boys seeing porn is an inherently bad thing, in all instances.

Citation needed.

[David Austin]

Re: What about Consent?

For "Normal" porn, the actors have been paid and consented (all kinds of issues and edge cases aside for a simplistic view);

For this site and others like it, you can make nudes of varying degrees of credulity of anyone, without their consent, knowledge, or compensation.

I offer no moral judgement on anyone who does or does not like nudes or porn; Doing it this way removes consent and recompense, nuding people against their will for, in the best most innocent case, your own personal gratification, with a sliding scale down to reputation damage, revenge, blackmail, and illegal categories of photos.

[Czrly]

Re: What about Consent?

« If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools… » (TL;DR: no, I didn't.)

[shane fitzgerald]

Re: Consent?

Whack a mole. shut 10 another 10 pop up. The tech is hardly rocket science at this point... im not saying i agree with it but its like the fight against piracy, against hackers, against big tech sucking your personal date. ITs an impossible war.

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: Consent?

My "personal date" might enjoy being sucked...

[Excused Boots]

Re: Consent?

Possibly, whatever floats your boat!

[Tron]

Everyone clamouring for censorship in the UK.

But condemning China and Russia for censoring the internet.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Everyone clamouring for censorship in the UK.

Legal systems are like that. If I lock you in a cellar, that's bad. If the government locks you in a prison, it's OK.

So for censorship, you've got to ask why is it being done and what can people do to avoid it. If the answers are "cause Pooh bear doesn't like you" and "eff all", then that's different from "made money by facilitating sexual harassment" and "get a proper job".

[xyz]

It's not really porn though is it...

more big time upskirting, which is a criminal offence, whatever your age.

[spold]

Please upload a picture of your old shrivelled worn-out previously naughty bits so we can verify your old age....

[David 132]

More like in my case, "Thank you for successfully completing the age verification. As a result of the information you've submitted, we're redirecting you from sexy-nudes-dot-com to a site offering good deals on woolly cardigans & Werthers Originals."

[DS999]

How would they enforce that fine?

I don't know where they are based, but if they were based in the US or EU with no business presence in the UK, how can your government collect? All they could do force UK ISPs to block them or UK banks to disallow payments to them.

[Blitheringeejit]

Re: How would they enforce that fine?

I think OfCom know there's no likelihood of collecting fines - just as with the 4chan case. But maybe there's a procedural requirement for the prosecuted party to fail to pay the fine before OfCom can require ISPs and fintechs who DO operate within their jurisdiction to block access and payments to the sanctioned platforms.

Can any lawyers (or folks who have actually bothered to read the legislation in full) confirm? I'm not and haven't, so only guessing...

[Jamie Jones]

Re: How would they enforce that fine?

If they are going to force ISPs to block the site (as they do already with things such as "The Pirate Bay"), then why don't they just go down that route in the first place? It seems they can do that without somehow warning the site first.

Age-verification mechanisms are already in place in the UK ISPs, so they could easily integrate the block of "age sensitive" sites into that.

However, this whole thing isn't about "protecting the children" - if it was, that's the mechanism they'd use. It would be more reliable, it would be cheaper, but it wouldn't get headlines like "White Knight Ofcom fines internet company for naughty stuff"

Meanwhile, scam adverts (which are under Ofcoms remit) are untouched. I'm not even talking about hard to trace fake scam sites that are set up temporarily. I'm talking about Google (specifically youtube), twitter, and presumably most of the other big name social medias as well.

You can catch a scam ad on google with just an hours use of normal browsing of youtube. If you report an obvious scam to youtube, you'll get a reply "this does not break our terms of service" (I've had that twice, for 2 different scams) - so therefore, youtube is admitting that scams are part of their normal operation.

Does Ofcom do anything? No, they announce stupid fines on sites like 4chan, because that's what pleases Daily Mail readers.

Now look what you've done, you've got me ranting!

[Dr Dan Holdsworth]

Re: How would they enforce that fine?

They won't. They can't.

OFCOM have been handed an impossible job by idiot MPs who once again are looking at the Internet, misunderstanding what is going on, misunderstanding what they can and cannot regulate and going on to make complete fools of themselves.

OFCOM have furthermore been told to make even bigger twerps of themselves by issuing legal notices and fines by email, rather than by following existing treaty-based cooperation rules. 4chan has of course noted this, and also included all manner of dog-whistle politics in its court submission, including noting that the issue of who was sovereign over the US was sorted out in the war of independence and that the UK is in no position to re-litigate this decision.Basically their court case is a rather long declaration of "UK laws are for UK companies only and not for non-UK companies".

Unfortunately OFCOM lack the balls to turn round to Government and point out that attempting to fine non-UK entities merely makes them and the UK government look like idiots.

[cookiecutter]

blackmail incoming

maybe the idiots at ofcom should look at the t&cs of linkedin idv provider, which will take your iD and link out to 3rd party data & sell it while making you sign a contract saying you'll not sue it.. which is why i wont get verified.

or the ID "providers" that state that your data is stored on developer laptops or dropbox.

it genuinely amazes me how dumb anyone working at Ofanything REALLY are or whether they're all gushing for jobs in the industry they're supposed to be regulating.

ofwat... yeah go ahead dump shit in the river while taking out £billions of loans & shovelling it to dividends & doubling bills

ofcom... yeah vodafone & 3, having 1 less provider is GREAT for consumer choice

competition commission (or whatever the useless bastards are called now), yeah MS & Activision, we trust you not to lie to us and fuck up consumers while firing everyone.

the environment agency? useless!

mod? useless!

department of business? useless!!

the ONLY thing these fucks are good at is shovelling the cash upwards & then whining when Gen Z come along and say "go fuck yourself" to joining the army.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: blackmail incoming

Or in fact Discord where they said your image was *not* stored, and then, um, the third party *did* store your image.

It's also worth looking at what the regulators actually do. People complain about Ofgem, but their remit is to keep the energy market stable, it's *not* to keep bills low (unless you're in a vulnerable group). Complain to your MP, and it all needs to be paid for somehow.

Although, yes, personally I'd rather the water industry remained privatised, we'd all had slightly higher bills, and we actually had new reservoirs in the last thirty years.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: blackmail incoming

It's almost as if not siphoning money to third-party shareholders can get us better value for money!

[Blackjack]

[AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks]

How about all those other laws AI nudification sites break uh?

[frood]

Kids will be going old school

Some will use VPNs to access completely unregulated sites. Downloading videos and images and sharing them. By UK law this is creating illegal porn and treated accordingly. We’ve made a generation of schoolkids open to our harshest pornography laws pwhilst simultaneously removing any censorship that was there before.

Well done gov UK

[ridley]

Re: Kids will be going old school

If the porn is legal then downloading and sharing it isn't creating and distributing illegal porn, no matter what age the downloader.

[Rahbut]

Re: Kids will be going old school

Isn't the problem that kids will use pictures of their peers, which will invariably mean some material will be of subjects younger than the law allows for?

[Dr Dan Holdsworth]

Re: Kids will be going old school

Worse, we've also taught them that if a UK law is inconvenient then you simply bypass it; the UK government is composed entirely of morons and as such should be bypassed altogether.

This is not a smart thing to teach future taxpayers.

[Felonmarmer]

So we can fine people in other countries for not following our laws?

So will the UK gov support Saudi when they sue UK distillaries for having a web presence?

[seldom]

Re: So we can fine people in other countries for not following our laws?

Not only that. HMG will ask if there are any journalists they can dismember for them, if there is a lucrative arms contract in the offing (pun intended).

[Anonymous Coward]

Don’t look, you’ll go blind!

Shower with your pants on.

In the dark!

[Dwarf]

Current generation Yoof of the day

I'm fairly certain - following over a decade of research, that most young ladies are built pretty much the same, so if you can imagine one and you can imagine their face, then you are probably not too far off from what the real thing will look like, if you are lucky enough to find out. I'm guessing it works similarly for the ladies too, just add a beer belly here and there and a couple of tattoos.

No computers required, no AI, no subscriptions, no trouble from the regulator.

We really don't need computers for everything we do.

[SVD_NL]

"technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair."

This list suspiciously doesn't include the words "secure" or "private".

[CAPS LOCK]

A while back at number 10...

Government suit: We need to find more ways to extract taxes. Suggestions!

Gov. advisor (mate from school): Well in the past taxes on things people like have worked well, car tax for example...

Government suit: Go on..

Advisor: Well people like internet porn...

Suit: So how do we tax that !?...

Advisor: Well first we seize control on the mechanism of transport, the inter-thingy...

Suit: How?

Advisor, well we use one of the well worn excuses to create a licensing situation. First we introduce legislation to make porn users turn to VPNs. I know about them, as I have a fourteen year old son. Then

we make it compulsory to have a license for a VPN. You know the drill. Then we bring in a white list of sites you are allowed to visit and make a charge for inclusion, small at first so the site owners can't object.

Suit: Trebles all round!