Hugging Face hosts nudification tools targeting a former Trump cabinet official and other senior…

Hugging Face, an AI platform that advocates for ethical development, continues to host tools designed to generate non-consensual deepfake nude imagery of senior US political figures, former government officials, and high-profile celebrities. Despite public stances against such practices, the platform provides access to specific files that enable the creation of sexually explicit content without the consent of the subjects.

What happened

Research identified that the platform hosts numerous "Low-Rank Adaptations" (LoRAs), which are files used to fine-tune image models to produce realistic depictions of specific individuals. These tools are explicitly designed to interface with "BigLust," a model utilized for generating pornography, and none of the identified tools are age-gated. The targeted individuals include a former Trump cabinet official, a prominent woman in the White House, sitting members of Congress, and a high-ranking US judge. Among the public figures mentioned are Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Taylor Swift.

While Hugging Face's content policy explicitly forbids sexual content created without consent, the platform continues to host these tools. This occurs despite previous investigations by Transformer and 404 Media that exposed similar content, which resulted in the removal of some, but not all, of the materials. Although the company has publicly condemned non-consensual deepfake pornography as a "massively harmful practice," it has not successfully purged the ecosystem of these generation tools. Hugging Face did not provide a comment regarding the persistence of these files on their platform.