Revealed - Names linked to Clothoff, the deepfake pornography app

The first Miriam al-Adib learned of the pictures was when she returned home from a business trip. "Mum," said her daughter, 14. "I want to show you something."

- Michael Safi and Alex Atack, Joshua Kelly

The girl opened her phone to show an explicit image of herself. "It's a shock when you see it," said Adib, a gynaecologist in the Spanish town of Almendralejo and a mother of four girls. "The image is completely realistic... If I didn't know my daughter's body, I would have thought that image was real." 

It was a deepfake, one of dozens of nude images of schoolgirls in Almendralejo that had been generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and had been circulating in the town for weeks in a WhatsApp group set up by other schoolchildren.

Some of the girls whose likenesses were being spread were refusing to go to school, suffering panic attacks, being blackmailed and getting bullied in public. "My concern was that these images had reached pornographic sites that we still don't know about today," Adib told the Guardian from her clinic.

State prosecutors are considering charges against some of the children who created the images using an app downloaded from the internet. But they had been unable to identify the people responsible for developing the app, who they suspected were based somewhere in eastern Europe, they said.

The Spanish incident flared into global news last year and made Almendralejo, a small southern town of faded Renaissance-era churches and plazas near the Portuguese border, the site of the latest warning shot from an imminent future where AI tools allow anyone to generate hyperrealistic images with a few clicks.

But while deepfakes of pop stars such as Taylor Swift have generated the most attention, they represent the tip of an iceberg of nonconsensual images that are proliferating across the internet and which police are largely powerless to stop.

As Adib was learning of the pictures, thousands of miles away at the Westfield High School in New Jersey, a strikingly similar case was playing out: many girls targeted by explicit deepfake images generated by students in their classes.