Key Points
Two bots listed more than 400,000 monthly users each, while another 14 listed more than 100,000 members each..
After WIRED contacted Telegram with questions about whether it allows explicit deepfake content creation on its platform, the company deleted the 75 bots and channels WIRED identified..
While the bots had millions of monthly users, according to Telegrams statistics, it is unclear how many images the bots may have been used to create..
While the first Telegram bots, identified several years ago, were relatively rudimentary, the technology needed to create more realistic AI-generated images has improvedand some of the bots are hiding in plain sight...
Bot developers can require users to accept terms of service, which may forbid users from uploading images without the consent of the person depicted or images of children, but there appears to be little or no enforcement of these rules.. Another bot, which had more than 38,000 users, claimed people could send six images of the same man or womanit is one of a small number that claims to create images of mento train an AI model, which could then create new deepfake images of that individual..
