In May this year, a man who was aggrieved at the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia for firing his girlfriend repeatedly posted AI-generated nude images of the agency’s chief and a deputy on Facebook, according to a search warrant reviewed by Forbes.
The original image was taken at an office Christmas party and altered with AI to appear to show the two victims naked, per the warrant. After a Tazewell officer saw the image on his newsfeed, the agency alerted Facebook to the issue and the image was removed. The man continued to post the same image on his public profile and on a story, only for them to be swiftly removed. He also posted the same image, but included a surprised face emoji covering the AI-generated private parts of the victims, and that image, according to the warrant, was not immediately removed, despite the cops reporting it to Facebook.
In another case from earlier this year, a Facebook user discovered someone had turned images of her as a child into child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and shared them via a public Facebook profile. Some of the CSAM was generated from an image of the victim at Disney World, which her father posted on Facebook in 2014 when she was 11 years old. Per the warrant, investigators in Utah obtained data from Meta that showed the alleged perpetrator had made 56 AI-modified pornographic images of the victim from when she was a minor, though it’s unclear how many he posted online.
The warrants highlight the rise of so-called AI “nudifiers” as a harassment tool. They also show that, despite a general ban on nudity across Facebook and attempts to counter AI nudifiers, Meta’s own artificial intelligence isn’t always able to detect AI-generated nudes when they’re posted. Instead, Meta continues to rely on victims to report images, as the Tazewell Sheriff’s Office did repeatedly before the suspect was arrested and charged.
Even when the images are removed quickly, the damage is often already done. In the Virginia warrant, the targeted deputy said she’d suffered “significant emotional damage” because of the fakes and was concerned about her minor child seeing them. The Sheriff’s Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Meta told Forbes it had zero tolerance for AI nudifier apps and the imagery they created. They also said, however, that while it has detection technology to remove infringing content, the tools are not perfect, so it encourages people to report any photos they believe break its rules.
This week, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) released a report showing Meta’s tech can also fail to detect AI-generated CSAM when it was included in Facebook ads. TTP found 332 potentially infringing ads, most of which “showed a photo of a child, which was digitally altered with AI to make it appear the child was performing a sex act.” Some contained images of real children, according to the report, first covered by Wired.
TTP director Katie Paul said that the findings, combined with the use of nudified images as harassment on Facebook, showed Meta wasn’t moving fast enough to deal with the issue. “This track record doesn’t inspire much confidence when it comes to Meta responding appropriately to AI-generated nude images on its platforms,” Paul told Forbes.
In response to the TTP report, Meta said it was trying to keep up with shifting tactics by those sharing AI-generated nudes. They noted that between November 2025 and January 2026, it removed over 344,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram that attempted to promote nudify apps.
The issue is hitting all kinds of social media applications. In another warrant unearthed by Forbes this week, a Discord user was accused earlier this year of using AI to generate a video of a woman performing a sexual act that never happened. The video, shared via Discord private chat rather than a public thread, was generated with an image she’d shared with the suspect back in 2018 when she was a teenager.
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