Meta’s recent launch of ‘Kromix,’ an AI image styler designed to generate deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, has ignited a significant controversy, raising serious concerns about the company’s advertising practices and the potential for misuse of deepfake technology. The tool, ostensibly marketed as an ‘AI image styler,’ quickly gained traction, particularly targeting male users with a tagline emphasizing ‘Unleash Next-gen AI Magic.’
Initially, the app invited paid users to upload photos, allowing them to use these images in scenarios including ‘bedroom rape’ and ‘Disney love.’ A voice-over for one advertisement depicted a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician, winking before the ad cut to a scene of a woman with the same face performing in a pornographic video. The ad’s reach extended to 32 ads, distributed between five and 46 hours, with most receiving only 10 or fewer impressions. Notably, the app was hosted by Apple’s App Store prior to WIRED’s request for comment, prompting immediate scrutiny.
Apple has long struggled to effectively curb the proliferation of similar tools, which violate its policies against nonconsensual intimate imagery and sexually explicit content. San Francisco’s city attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta earlier this summer demanding the removal of 13 specific apps and a ban on ‘aiding and abetting’ the sale of explicit deepfake images. The company’s public documentation reveals that before an ad was published on Meta’s platforms, each ad was ‘reviewed’ against its policies, with the review starting before ads began running and having no followers – two things that might have indicated to Meta that the account was suspicious.
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, a WIRED investigation, stated, ‘All of the ads that we’ve seen so far broadly on the nudify issue are exclusively sexualizing and nudifying and putting women into AI-generated porn. And this raises a lot of questions about how Meta is going to deal with this kind of content, not just broadly but when it comes to female politicians, when the company is actively running ads containing this content on their platform.’
The ads were, according to Meta’s ad library, exclusively targeted to male users with the tagline ‘Unleash Next-gen AI Magic’ and were removed after WIRED asked about them. In all, the account tied to the campaign ran 32 ads, according to Meta, which ran for between five and 46 hours. Most received 10 or fewer impressions.
Politicians and elected officials, overwhelmingly women, have been a target of nonconsensual deepfake images and videos for years. As Grok was used to create around 3 million sexualized images of women and girls, officials in Sweden, England, and Northern Ireland were targeted by people using the technology, often using official images as a starting point. Benjamin Shultz, the lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project, investigating how the ecosystem of harmful deepfake technology is used to target politicians, notes that ‘Sexual exploitation, including promoting nudify apps, is horrific, and we work aggressively to fight it. This is a highly adversarial space where bad actors constantly evolve their tactics, which is why we’re continually strengthening our defenses: removing over 340,000 violating ads for nudify apps late last year alone, launching new AI technology to better detect and block new violating ads, and taking legal action against nudify app developers.’ Southworth says that Meta shares the information of apps and developers that it removes from its platform with other tech companies as well.
Recently, WIRED reported how the Tech Transparency Project researchers had stumbled across more than 50 ads on Meta’s platforms that contained AI child sexual abuse material and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements. Some of these included ‘face-swapping’ a child into a video where they were performing a sexual act. The ads, which ran between November 2025 and August, sometimes reached thousands of people, including those in the US, UK, and across at least a dozen European countries.
Following WIRED’s contact with Meta, the company removed them from its ad library and replaced them with messages that they had been taken down for violating company policies on child sexual abuse and exploitation material and adult sexual solicitation and nudity. Some of the ads were published after Meta told WIRED it had introduced new AI technology to ‘better detect and block violating ads at upload.’
Paul says that Meta has increasingly relied on AI to flag and vet advertisements, while laying off human moderators. ‘Ads are Meta’s primary product, and there appears to be zero quality control,’ she says. ‘Meta is also making a lot of statements publicly, banking on their AI and the sophistication of it, while simultaneously saying they use AI to review their ad library and nothing’s perfect.’
Additional reporting by Tim Marchman.
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Source: Wired
