Police in eastern Spain are investigating a 17-year-old boy on suspicion of using artificial intelligence to create and share fake nude images of his female schoolmates that he intended to sell online.
Guardia Civil officers in the Ribera Alta area of Valencia began investigating in December last year after a female student reported the creation of a social media account in her name that featured an AI-generated video.
Guardia Civil said in a statement on Sunday: “Photos of various people, all of them minors, appeared on this account. All these photos had been modified from the originals, which had been manipulated so that the people in them appeared completely naked.”
The same girl reported a second social media account in her name, as well as other accounts that showed AI-generated nude videos, and a webpage devoted to advertising the images for commercial purposes.
After 15 other minors came forward with similar complaints, officers began to suspect the person behind the faked images and videos was one of the girls’ schoolmates.
By trawling social media posts, contacting hosting companies and examining a website advertising AI image modification services, police picked up the trail of the suspect.
Guardia Civil said: “Officers obtained user and access information used on these platforms – including IP addresses – which led to the home of one of the complainants’ schoolmates. They also confirmed that the emails used to create the accounts belonged to the same person.”
The Guardia Civil said a 17-year-old boy was being investigated on suspicion of corrupting minors, adding that a youth court in Valencia was overseeing the case.
Last year, 15 minors in the south-western Spanish region of Extremadura were sentenced to a year’s probation after being convicted of using AI to produce fake naked images of their female schoolmates, which they had shared on WhatsApp groups.
The defendants were also ordered to attend classes on gender and equality awareness, and on the “responsible use of technology”.
The court said in a statement: “The sentence notes that it has been proved that the minors used artificial intelligence applications to obtain manipulated images of [other minors] by taking girls’ original faces from their social media profiles and superimposing those images on the bodies of naked female bodies. The manipulated photos were then shared on two WhatsApp groups.”
The Malvaluna Association, which acted on behalf of the affected families, said the case had implications for wider Spanish society. “Beyond this particular trial, these facts should make us reflect on the need to educate people about equality between men and women,” the association told the online newspaper ElDiario.es at the time.
It said the case underlined the necessity of proper sex education at school so that children did not learn about sex from pornography, which “generates more sexism and violence”.
In March, Spain’s socialist-led government said it was working on a law that would help protect young people online by treating internet grooming and the use of non-consensual AI-created sexual imagery as criminal offences.
