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AI-generated sexual content is rapidly remaking young people’s lives as they confront sex and dating — and the effects are as sweeping as they are poorly understood.
That’s according to a new survey from the nonprofit Common Sense Media, in which researchers dug into how youth are interacting with these new technologies. What they found suggests that the proliferation of this kind of content — and the harm it’s already causing — demand urgent attention.
The nationally representative survey drew on insights from 1,314 teenagers aged 13 to 17, as well as additional data from interviews and focus groups, and defines AI-generated sexual content as deepfaked nude images or pornographic material of real people, AI images and videos of people depicted in revealing or sexually explicit scenarios, or “any other sexual content made by AI.” It comes as middle and high schools around the country grapple with an explosion of nonconsensual deepfakes of minors that have largely been created and disseminated by their peers.
“For a good chunk of teens, one, they’re being exposed to this content — but two, they are creating and sharing this content,” Supreet Mann, Common Sense Media’s director of research and the lead author of the report, told Futurism. “And when they’re doing that, it’s very often of people they know personally or themselves.”
The report found that nearly half of high school and middle school-aged teens have seen what they believed to be AI-generated sexual content, with most reporting that they discovered it accidentally, often by way of social media. Of the teens who reported seeing this kind of content, about 64 percent said it depicted recognizable celebrities, while 24 percent shared that the content showed either them or someone they knew in real life.
Roughly eight percent of teens, meanwhile, reported creating deepfakes or other AI-generated sexual content themselves, while another 13 percent shared that they knew someone who had generated sexual content using AI. Of that cohort, more than 60 percent noted that the “content depicted themselves or people they know personally, like peers, friends, or current and former romantic partners.”
The anxiety around this kind of material has driven some kids to change their behaviors online, the report found. Around 67 percent of surveyed teens shared that they were at least somewhat worried that they could be impacted by deepfakes, and nearly 40 percent have made their social media accounts private, are limiting what they share, or have fully deleted social media.
“About two-thirds of teens indicated that they were worried about this, and many of those young people are changing their online behaviors because of that fear… that’s a very interesting tell of how young people are thinking about the content, and they’re thinking about this lack of agency that they have in the space,” said Mann. And while it’s not a bad thing for kids to think critically about their online presence, Mann added, as it stands, the burden is falling heavily on the shoulders of teens themselves to cope with the deepfake influx.
“Why are young people being forced to police themselves,” asked the researcher, “when this really shouldn’t be their burden to carry?”
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