TikTok creator and influencer Bobbi Althoff was recently trending on social media, but unfortunately not because of an interview she released for her podcast.
In a video shared to her Instagram Stories, Althoff explained how she noticed that she was trending on X, formerly Twitter, and was horrified by what she saw when she discovered why. Sadly she wasn't trending due to fans discussing her content, but because highly explicit, NSFW AI-generated images and videos of Althoff were circulating online.
"Guys, funny story," she said in the video, as seen below. "Yesterday I went on X, Twitter, and I saw that I was trending. And I was like, 'Oh my God. That's a first, I'm trending on Twitter. You guys must really love my podcast. Wow.' So I clicked it, and I was like, 'What the fuck is this?' ... I felt like it was a mistake or something, like, it was like bots or something. I didn't realize that it was actually people believing that that was me until my whole team called me and were like, 'Is this real?' You guys... Anyway, not me. Sorry to disappoint. But, what the fuck? That was so graphic, too. I was like, 'Oh my God. Need to cover my eyes.'"
Before sharing her response video, Althoff announced that the leak was fake.
"Hate to disappoint you all, but the reason I'm trending is 100% not me & is definitely AI generated," she wrote on her Instagram Stories.
The graphic content was being circulated by an army of bot accounts, but plenty of real people reacted to it as if it were real. One viral tweet containing a censored version of the content has been hit with a community note stressing that the video is a deepfake, or digital manipulation made to look like Althoff. But the fact that the content was able to spread so easily and quickly raises further concerns about moderation issues on X since Elon Musk took over.
This incident also highlights the dangers that AI technology specifically poses to women, as it's now easier than ever to create maliciously fake nude content and spread it online. What happened to Althoff is similar to what happened with Taylor Swift just last month, when fans came to the singer's defense after AI-rendered NSFW images of her spread online.
Searches for Swift were even temporarily blocked by X's moderation team to combat the spread of the content. In response to that incident, the White House spoke about the problem of the growing proliferation of explicit AI images.
"We are alarmed by the reports of the... circulation of images that you just laid out – of false images to be more exact, and it is alarming," Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told ABC News at the time. "While social media companies make their own independent decisions about content management, we believe they have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation, and non-consensual, intimate imagery of real people."
Althoff was previously the subject of another manufactured controversy earlier this month, when some online sleuths were convinced that Drake, whom she interviewed last year, had something to do with her decision to divorce her estranged husband Cory.
