In schools across at least 28 countries, children have opened their phones to find naked photos of themselves that they never took. The pictures are fake, built by an app that uses AI to undress an ordinary photo pulled from social media. Usually the person who made them sits a few desks away. This is the harm that nudify apps have made cheap and quick, and it is the one most parents have heard the least about.
What is actually happening
A nudify app takes a normal photograph and generates a realistic fake nude from it. Not a private picture, not anything risky: a school portrait, a holiday snap, a shot from sports day. WIRED and Indicator, investigating together, found reported cases in around 90 schools across 28 countries, affecting more than 640 children, and almost everyone working on this thinks the real figure is far higher, because schools handle it quietly and the children targeted tend to stay silent.
The direction is not subtle. The Internet Watch Foundation, whose job is to take child sexual abuse material off the internet, watched realistic AI-generated videos of it leap from 13 cases in 2024 to more than 3,400 the next year. The US national tip line went from a few thousand AI-image reports in 2023 to hundreds of thousands in the first half of 2025 alone. UNICEF puts the number of children targeted with sexual deepfakes in a single year above a million. And the victims are almost always girls, faked by boys they know.
Why “be more careful” misses the point
Your first instinct might be that children just need to be more careful about what they post. It is a fair thought, and it does not get you far, because the source image can be almost any clear photo of a face. A child who has never sent a private picture, who is barely online at all, can still be faked from a class group shot or a photo a friend uploaded. So this was never really about your child’s caution, which cuts two ways: you can’t fully prevent it by policing what they post, and if it does happen, your child is not the one who did something wrong, however much they may feel they were.
If it happens to your child
Two facts are worth knowing in advance, because they change how the moment feels.
It is a crime. In the UK, creating or sharing a sexual image of a child, AI-made or not, is already illegal. In the US, the TAKE IT DOWN Act makes knowingly publishing one a federal offence, with stiffer penalties when the victim is a minor.
The images can be removed, for free. The main routes are:
- Under 18, internationally: Take It Down, run by the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, helps stop a nude image of a minor spreading across participating platforms.
- Under 18, UK: Report Remove, from Childline and the IWF, does the same.
- 18 and over: StopNCII.org.
US platforms now have to pull a flagged image within 48 hours of a valid report, and regulators have started going after the apps themselves. Wherever you live, your national child-protection line will deal with this directly.
If you are in the middle of it, the order that helps is:
- Keep the evidence. Don’t delete everything in a panic. Screenshots and links are what get images removed and offenders identified.
- Report it twice: to the platform, and to one of the takedown services above.
- Tell the school. They can reach the rumours and the social fallout you can’t.
- Report to the police or your national child-protection line.
Underneath all of it, lead with support. A targeted child is usually terrified and ashamed, and the thing survivors say lasts longest is not the image. It is the shame.
Have the conversation first
None of that works as well as a five-minute talk before any of it happens:
- A photo can be faked into a nude, so seeing one doesn’t mean the real thing ever existed.
- If it happens to you or a friend, it is not your fault, and not something to hide.
- Come to me and I’ll help, not punish.
The most important thing is to get a frightened child to you early, while an image can still be contained, instead of quietly paying a blackmailer and hoping it disappears.
The wider world is catching up, slowly. App stores and the tools themselves are under real legal pressure now, and some governments are trying to block this material on the device itself. But that is partial and slow.
The takedown tools matter and the law is finally moving, but the protection that kicks in earliest is a child who already knows they can come to you.
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