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An AI image<\/span> generator startup left more than 1 million images and videos created with its systems exposed and accessible to anyone online, according to new research reviewed by WIRED. The \u201coverwhelming majority\u201d of the images involved nudity and were \u201cdepicted adult content,\u201d according to the researcher who uncovered the exposed trove of data, with some appearing to depict children or the faces of children swapped onto the AI-generated bodies of nude adults.<\/p>\n Multiple websites\u2014including MagicEdit and DreamPal\u2014all appeared to be using the same unsecured database, says security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who discovered the security flaw in October. At the time, Fowler says, around 10,000 new images were being added to the database every day. Indicating how people may have been using the image-generation and editing tools, these images included \u201cunaltered\u201d photos of real people who may have been nonconsensually \u201cnudified,<\/a>\u201d or had their faces swapped onto other, naked bodies.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real issue is just innocent people, and especially underage people, having their images used without their consent to make sexual content,\u201d says Fowler, a prolific hunter of exposed databases, who published the findings on the ExpressVPN blog<\/a>. Fowler says it is the third misconfigured AI-image-generation database<\/a> he has found accessible online this year\u2014with all of them appearing to contain nonconsensual explicit imagery, including those of young people and children.<\/p>\n Fowler\u2019s findings come as AI-image-generation tools continue to be used to maliciously create explicit imagery of people. An enormous ecosystem of \u201cnudify\u201d services, which are used by millions of people<\/a> and make millions of dollars per year<\/a>, uses AI to \u201cstrip\u201d the clothes off of people\u2014almost entirely women\u2014in photos. Photos stolen from social media can be edited in just a couple of clicks: leading to the harrowing abuse and harassment of women. Meanwhile, reports<\/a> of criminals using AI to create child sexual abuse material, which covers a range of indecent images<\/a> involving children, have doubled over the past year.<\/p>\n \u201cWe take these concerns extremely seriously,\u201d says a spokesperson for a startup called DreamX, which operates MagicEdit and DreamPal. The spokesperson says that an influencer marketing firm linked to the database, called SocialBook, is run \u201cby a separate legal entity and is not involved\u201d in the operation of other sites. \u201cThese entities share some historical relationships through founders and legacy assets, but they operate independently with separate product lines,\u201d the spokesperson says.<\/p>\n \u201cSocialBook is not connected to the database you referenced, does not use this storage, and was not involved in its operation or management at any time,\u201d a SocialBook spokesperson tells WIRED. \u201cThe images referenced were not generated, processed, or stored by SocialBook\u2019s systems. SocialBook operates independently and has no role in the infrastructure described.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n