A school child has just figured out what AI can do to his classmate
The Motherless.com playbook is now in every school.
Content note: this post discusses AI-generated sexual abuse imagery of children, deepfake intimate-image abuse, and the structural failure of platform regulation to protect women and girls. Skip if this is not the day for it.
I did not want to have to write this post. Not writing it would be a dereliction of duty.
In this post I will:
Show what school children have already learnt to do with AI image tools.
Argue that the Motherless.com playbook of platform impunity is now operating inside every app store.
Make the case that this is rape culture’s next infrastructure, and what would actually change it.
The pattern in UK schools
Late in 2025, the Internet Watch Foundation classified 150 AI-generated images from one UK secondary school as criminal child sexual abuse material under UK law. They had been made by pupils, of pupils. The school is unnamed. The pattern repeats across the country.
UK schools are now being told to remove students’ photographs from their public websites. The instruction comes from the National Crime Agency, the Internet Watch Foundation, and the Early Warning Working Group. The reason is plain. Criminals are scraping ordinary class photos, feeding them through AI nudifier tools, and using the resulting images for blackmail. Children in primary schools are now using the same tools on their classmates. The classmates are almost always girls.
The first response is to delete the photographs. The supply of the technology that made the harm possible is untouched.
What happened in Almendralejo
In September 2023, in Almendralejo in southwestern Spain, more than 20 girls aged from 11 upwards were targeted with nude AI-generated images created by boys at their school. The app the boys used was called ClothOff. The Badajoz juvenile court convicted the boys on 20 counts of creating child abuse material and 20 counts against the moral integrity of the victims, with a year’s probation. In November 2025, Spain’s data-protection regulator AEPD fined the individual responsible for creating the images €2,000, reduced to €1,200 for prompt payment. It was the first AI-related image manipulation sanction in Spanish legal history.
ClothOff is still operating.
The Motherless precedent
The platform Motherless.com was founded in 2008 by a single individual, Joshua Lange, and operated for 18 years before public action shut it down. CNN reporting in 2026 documented over 20,000 videos on the site of so-called ‘sleep’ content, tagged with terms such as #passedout and #eyecheck, depicting victims who appeared drugged or unconscious.
For all 18 of those years, Motherless operated under Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, the legal principle that a platform is not liable for what its users post. The site was taken down on 8 May 2026 by Dutch authorities, where its servers were based. The takedown was triggered by sustained press investigation. Regulators played no role. The site was partially restored within days. Eighteen years of operation, and even the takedown was partial.
The structural shape is the lesson. A platform provides the infrastructure. The harm is produced by individual users. The platform invokes user-generated-content defences. Enforcement takes 18 years to catch up.
Nudify apps are still in your app store
In early 2026, the Tech Transparency Project documented 47 nudify apps available in Apple’s App Store and 55 in Google Play, despite both companies’ published policies forbidding them. Apple removed around 28 of the apps after the report was published. Google removed 31. Both companies were still serving paid advertisements for nudify apps in their own search results after the removals.
The broader figure for the global nudify app market is shocking. Nudify apps have collectively been downloaded around 483 million times, despite policy bans. They have generated more than $122 million in global revenue.
Nudify apps have been downloaded 483 million times and earned more than $122 million, against the largest sanction yet issued, €1,200 in Spain. Sources: Tech Transparency Project, 2026; Irish Times, 2025.
The infrastructure has moved from a single hosted site to every smartphone, distributed by the two app stores that govern almost all consumer software on Earth.
AI child sexual abuse imagery has scaled 26,385% in a year
The IWF’s 2025 annual report carries the title ‘Harm Without Limits’. The numbers carry the argument. The IWF assessed 8,029 AI-generated child sexual abuse images and videos in 2025. The line in the report that no one should be able to read past without stopping is on videos. In 2024, the IWF identified 13 AI-generated child sexual abuse videos. In 2025, it identified 3,443. That is a 26,385% increase in one calendar year.
AI-generated child sexual abuse videos identified by the Internet Watch Foundation rose from 13 in 2024 to 3,443 in 2025. Source: Internet Watch Foundation, Harm Without Limits, 2025.
65% of those AI-generated videos were classified as Category A, the most extreme classification under UK law. The comparable figure for non-AI imagery is 46%. ource: Internet Watch Foundation, Harm Without Limits, 2025.
97% of victims in AI-generated child sexual abuse material are girls.
This is happening now.
I have two young daughters. I do not know whether their images are already in someone’s dataset. The work for everyone in a position to act, whether parent or not, is to refuse the framing that this is somebody else’s problem to address later, and to act in a way that makes it harder for the next child to become a news story.
The reach of the Online Safety Act
On 31 January 2024, sharing AI-generated intimate images without consent became a criminal offence in England and Wales. The maximum sentence is two years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine. The sharing offence has ‘priority offence’ status under the Online Safety Act, which means Ofcom can sanction platforms that fail to take proactive steps to prevent it. On 16 April 2024, the government separately proposed criminalising the creation of such images for the purpose of causing alarm, distress, or humiliation.
Every part of the supply chain that lets a school child use one of these tools on a classmate is still operating freely. The model developers shipping uncensored tools. The platforms hosting the apps. The app stores listing them in search and selling ads for them. The legal cost of pursuing the chain is more than any family can absorb. Spain’s first AI sanction was €1,200 in total. The child’s school does not have lawyers on standby.
What would actually change this
The conversation defaults to ‘teach boys consent’. This conversation is necessary and it is also a category error. Children cannot be the principal regulatory mechanism for an industry whose business model is platform impunity. The change that would matter is structural. Platform liability for the apps companies distribute, with real penalties. Enforced app-store removal with criminal accountability for repeat hosting. Age-verification on AI image-generation tools at the model level. Mandatory disclosure of training data for any model that can be used to generate images of people. Treatment of model developers and platform operators as primary actors rather than as neutral conduits.
The Online Safety Act is the floor. The work now is to push for the ceiling.
Motherless.com operated for 18 years before anyone with the power to stop it did so. The current AI nudifier ecosystem began commercial operation in 2023. The clock is running on the same time horizon.
AI image abuse is rape culture’s next infrastructure. The same business model. The same legal defence. The same overwhelmingly female victim population. Only the friction has changed. The friction is now zero. The perpetrators now include children.
The refusal to treat this as inevitable is a heavy responsibility, but one that we must all bear.
Go slow.
arggggg - I write this instead of filthy words.
I have something to say and will wait until later to say it.
Thanks, Sam, for raising this.
AI in formal education is one dimension; however, parental guidance on AI use at home is equally critical and arguably less structured. I was struck when my 8-year-old son turned to an AI system to answer a very basic question—how to care for a dog. He later mentioned that AI tools have already been introduced at school. I would not advocate restricting generative AI in learning environments; rather, this experience reinforced the need to actively develop AI literacy and critical thinking. The priority, in my view, is to cultivate reflective use rather than passive reliance.
I am also not surprised that adolescents, as they begin to develop sexual curiosity, explore digital platforms—including AI systems—to address it. This is not a new phenomenon; it reflects longstanding sociocultural and biological drivers. However, generative AI appears to be accelerating both access and exposure, in ways that outpace the ability of parents, educators, and policymakers to provide adequate guidance or safeguards. In that sense, the technology is not creating the underlying issue but is amplifying it at a rate that challenges existing oversight structures.
For this reason, your framing of “Slow AI” resonates strongly. It captures the need for a more deliberate, developmentally informed approach to integrating these tools—particularly in educational and domestic contexts. This remains a persistently complex problem, with no straightforward solution.