Meta ran ads for AI app promising to ‘Nudify’ female politicians; Apple pulls it from App Store

Meta recently ran advertisements on its platforms for an AI tool that encouraged users to generate nonconsensual intimate images and videos of women, including deepfakes resembling female U.S. politicians, despite the company’s explicit bans on sexual content and “nudify” apps.

The app, called Kromix and marketed as an “AI image styler,” featured video ads that WIRED reviewed. One advertisement showed a woman closely resembling a prominent female U.S. politician standing in front of American flags with the caption “What if she moved?” She winked, then the ad cut to a pornographic video featuring a woman with the same face. A voice-over promoted the tool as having “no restrictions,” claimed “all the characters are real people,” and described it as “the AI that men actually use.”

According to Meta’s ad library, the campaign targeted male users exclusively under the tagline “Unleash Next-gen AI Magic.” The account behind the ads, created in early August with no followers, ran 32 advertisements that lasted between five and 46 hours. Most received fewer than 10 impressions. The ads were removed after WIRED inquired about them.

Kromix, previously available on Apple’s App Store, allowed paid users to upload photos and place them into scenarios including “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” It also generated AI pornographic videos of women in Spider-Man costumes. Apple removed the app after WIRED’s request for comment, stating that the developer had added prohibited content after initial review. The company reiterated that apps designed to generate or distribute pornography, including “nudification” tools, violate its guidelines and that it works aggressively to remove them.

This incident marks the latest failure by Meta to keep ads for tools producing nonconsensual intimate imagery off Facebook and Instagram. Researchers and the company itself have previously documented thousands of similar ads. Between late last year and early this year, Meta said it removed more than 340,000 ads promoting nudify services and has pursued legal action against at least one developer.

Meta’s advertising standards prohibit sexual imagery, nudity, and the promotion of nudify or “AI kissing” apps. The company says its review system relies primarily on automated tools and that it continuously strengthens defenses against adversarial tactics, such as using benign cover images of beaches or mountains to hide pornographic content. Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety, called the promotion of such apps “horrific” and said the company shares information about removed apps with other tech firms while investigating how these particular ads bypassed detection.

Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, which discovered the ads, noted that the material exclusively sexualizes women and raises questions about Meta’s handling of content targeting female politicians. Experts point out that elected officials, overwhelmingly women, have long been targets of nonconsensual deepfakes, with official portraits and press footage increasingly used as raw material for low- and no-code AI tools.

MacDailyNews Take: The episode comes amid broader scrutiny of Meta’s ad moderation, including recent revelations that the company ran dozens of ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material. It seems that that heavy reliance on AI moderation, coupled with reduced human oversight, has left quality control lagging behind the rapid evolution of harmful deepfake technology.

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