Francesca Mani

Last October, 15-year-old New Jersey high school student Franceseca Mani learned that boys in her class had used AI software to fabricate sexually explicit images of Mani and her female classmates. Since then, she has been on a mission to prevent this from happening to others: Mani has been stumping for change in front of policymakers, school boards and tech companies across the country.

“When that happened to me and my classmates, we had zero protection whatsoever,” Mani says. “I want to tell these women and girls that we’re here for them.” 

Since AI image generation tools have become widely accessible in the last few years, the number of sexually-explicit deepfakes circulating the web has sharply increased. Early this year, AI-generated pornographic and sometimes violent images of Taylor Swift were widely shared on social media. Similar images, which can be created with the click of a button, are being used to humiliate and bully young women around the world. Watchdog agencies now warn that child sexual abuse images could flood the internet if controls aren’t placed over AI tools. 

Mani says that after she began speaking out about her experience with deepfakes, other girls started writing to her from around the world, saying they had been similarly targeted. “There were so many girls from different states, different countries,” says Mani. “And we all had three things in common: the lack of AI school policies, the lack of laws, and the disregard of consent.” So over the past year, Mani and her mother Dorota have been crisscrossing the country, advocating for change across all three areas. Mani spoke at a hearing to support Senator Ted Cruz’s “Take It Down” bill, which aims to force websites to remove explicit images and make publishing such content a federal crime. (Similar bills have been passed in states including New York and Virginia, where laws were updated to ban sexually-explicit deepfakes.)

Mani is also working with the activist coalition Encode Justice on a nationwide campaign to lobby for the creation of district-level deepfake abuse policies. “My goal is to protect women and children—and we first need to start with AI school policies, because this is where most of the targeting is happening,” she says.