'Nudify' AI-undress app promotion and Reddit's domain bans (2023–2024)

Beginning in 2023, the social-media analysis firm Graphika documented an explosive rise in the promotion of so-called 'nudify' or 'undress' apps — services that use AI to fabricate fake nude images of real people from clothed photographs, almost always targeting women and girls without their knowledge or consent. Graphika reported that the volume of links advertising such apps across social platforms, including X and Reddit, rose more than 2,400 percent over the year, and that a set of the services drew tens of millions of visits in a single month.

The apps' business model depended on cheap, viral distribution, and open platforms with large audiences were a natural advertising channel. Reporting by TIME and Fortune in December 2023, drawing on the Graphika findings, described how links and referral promotions for these tools spread through posts and comments, often reaching users who had not sought them out. The fabricated images are a form of non-consensual intimate imagery, and victim advocates warned that the tools lowered the technical bar for producing such abuse to almost nothing.

Reddit's content policy already prohibited sharing non-consensual faked sexually explicit material. Asked about the research, a Reddit spokesperson said the platform bans such sharing and had banned several domains as a result of the findings. That action — blocking specific app domains rather than only removing individual posts — reflected the difficulty of policing a category of service whose entire purpose is producing abusive imagery.

The episode illustrated a persistent enforcement gap. Domain bans and keyword blocks can suppress the most visible promotion, but the apps proliferate under new names and mirror domains, and promotional content can be reframed to evade filters. Other platforms took parallel steps over the same period — including blocking search terms such as 'undress' — but researchers and journalists documented that the services remained widely reachable.

For Reddit specifically, the controversy sat at the intersection of its scale, its NSFW-tolerant culture, and its reliance on user reports and automated detection. Critics argued that a platform hosting large adult communities is an especially attractive target for tools marketing non-consensual imagery, and that reactive domain bans, while necessary, lag behind the speed at which such promotion spreads. The episode became part of the wider 2024 reckoning over AI-generated sexual abuse and the legislative response that followed.