Chi Cui

Chi Cui, Yixin Wu, Yang Zhang

AI nudification uses generative models to create synthetic non-consensual sexually explicit imagery (SNEACI) of real individuals. Prior work has examined dedicated nudification platforms and model repositories, finding that most targets are female celebrities. However, the anonymous content community, where SNEACI is actively requested, generated, and exchanged, remains unexplored. In this work, we present a large-scale study of AI nudification in the wild, identifying 24,105 SNEACI items. We find a significant shift in target demographics: non-celebrity individuals now account for 55.8\% of targets, compared to only 4.7\% in prior studies, indicating that AI nudification has expanded from targeting public figures to increasingly harming individuals within users' own social circles. Meanwhile, open-source models dominate production, with Stable Diffusion family generating 42.7\% of images and Wan generating 66.5\% of videos, all driven by thousands of shared fine-tuned models and accessible tutorials. Yet the ecosystem runs on a small cohort of active producers, with the most prolific producing 780 items, drives community engagement, shapes target demographics, and disseminates technical knowledge that lowers barriers for new producers. Our work provides an empirical understanding of how AI nudification operates in the wild, revealing the mechanisms that sustain this ecosystem and highlighting the urgent need for interventions in platform governance, technical safeguards, and affected individual protection.

Yixin Wu, Rui Wen, Chi Cui et al.

Inference attacks have been widely studied and offer a systematic risk assessment of ML services; however, their implementation and the attack parameters for optimal estimation are challenging for non-experts. The emergence of advanced large language models presents a promising yet largely unexplored opportunity to develop autonomous agents as inference attack experts, helping address this challenge. In this paper, we propose AttackPilot, an autonomous agent capable of independently conducting inference attacks without human intervention. We evaluate it on 20 target services. The evaluation shows that our agent, using GPT-4o, achieves a 100.0% task completion rate and near-expert attack performance, with an average token cost of only $0.627 per run. The agent can also be powered by many other representative LLMs and can adaptively optimize its strategy under service constraints. We further perform trace analysis, demonstrating that design choices, such as a multi-agent framework and task-specific action spaces, effectively mitigate errors such as bad plans, inability to follow instructions, task context loss, and hallucinations. We anticipate that such agents could empower non-expert ML service providers, auditors, or regulators to systematically assess the risks of ML services without requiring deep domain expertise.