Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hey it's David Gurra. We've brought you stories about how
Speaker 2: artificial intelligence is changing our lives and our economy, from
Speaker 2: how it could reshape work to how it could supercharge
Speaker 2: demands for energy. Today we bring you a series about
Speaker 2: the human cost of unregulated AI and how lawmakers and
Speaker 2: law enforcement are struggling to keep up. Bloomberg reporters Margie
Speaker 2: Murphy and Olivia Carville have spent the last year digging
Speaker 2: into the stories of dozens of young women and teens
Speaker 2: in a New York suburb who found AI manipulated photos
Speaker 2: of themselves on a porn website. They had never consented
Speaker 2: to the creation of these images. When they're told there
Speaker 2: isn't much the police or anyone else can do, they
Speaker 2: decide to fight back and join a global battle against
Speaker 2: deep fakes. Here's the first episode of Marky and Olivia's
Speaker 2: six part series.
Speaker 3: The series explores sexualized imagery, evolving miners, and violence. Please
Speaker 3: take Kia when listening, Can we stop from the beginning?
Speaker 3: How did this will stop for you? So I can
Speaker 3: go back into it?
Speaker 4: I remember somehow all these pictures from my Instagram by Visco,
Speaker 4: We're all on this website. There was one picture of
Speaker 4: me in a bathing suit. Well, it was me in
Speaker 4: a bathing suit in one of my friend's backyards and
Speaker 4: I didn't have a bathing suit on anymore. And it
Speaker 4: was just me naked, well not me, but me with
Speaker 4: someone else's body parts on my body parts. It was
Speaker 4: just boobs and body parts completely nude that looked so
Speaker 4: much like my own body. There were so many different
Speaker 4: pictures from my social media on essentially a porn website.
Speaker 4: I was just trying to figure out exactly, like where
Speaker 4: is this coming from? Like how are they finding my stuff?
Speaker 4: I didn't let people follow me that I didn't know,
Speaker 4: so it was always in the back of my head like, oh,
Speaker 4: it's someone that I know, But how do you find
Speaker 4: out who that someone is when you know so many
Speaker 4: people from school, soccer, all these things.
Speaker 3: Did you ever have any suspicions as to who it
Speaker 3: was back then?
Speaker 4: No, not at all. It was always like, why is
Speaker 4: this happening? Who is this?
Speaker 3: Kayla was twenty years old and living at home with
Speaker 3: her parents in a town that was once the picture
Speaker 3: of the American dream, a Long Island suburb called Leavittown.
Speaker 3: We're driving around Leavittown. A lot of white picket fences,
Speaker 3: a lot of American flags. It has the feel of
Speaker 3: going back in time.
Speaker 5: Levittown one of the most remarkable housing developments ever conceived.
Speaker 3: It's the kind of America that makes you think of
Speaker 3: the nineteen fifties cookie cutter single family houses, like someone
Speaker 3: hit control C on the ideal suburban house and then
Speaker 3: pasted it over and over on street after street.
Speaker 5: The idea that came to a man named Bill Levitt
Speaker 5: was this, why not apply to the building of houses
Speaker 5: the same principles that have brought other American industries to
Speaker 5: their own exceled peaks of efficiency and service.
Speaker 3: Leavettown was built for veterans returning from World War II
Speaker 3: as the picture of white suburbia, perfect houses, manicured.
Speaker 2: Lawns started here and there.
Speaker 5: Throughout the huge area are shopping centers where every type
Speaker 5: of product or service is readily available Hue Stars five
Speaker 5: and Dimes Department Store.
Speaker 3: Today we often talk about the future as digital algorithms
Speaker 3: and codes, as the architecture of our lives, But back then,
Speaker 3: Levettown was the imagined future. It just feels like quite
Speaker 3: suburban and safe. You know, it feels like the kind
Speaker 3: of place that nothing really happens around here, and yet
Speaker 3: underneath the facade of perfect order, it's here I found
Speaker 3: a story unfolding of a group of women faced with
Speaker 3: a new reality none of them wanted, a technological reality
Speaker 3: spinning out of control. It's like, this is not the
Speaker 3: setting for a horror movie, and that's exactly what played out.
Speaker 3: But this isn't your average horror story, the kind where
Speaker 3: a group of teens are hunted down until there's only
Speaker 3: one left standing. In this story, they flip the script,
Speaker 3: band together and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies,
Speaker 3: forcing law enforcement and tech companies to sit up and
Speaker 3: take notice. From iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope. This is Levettown.
Speaker 3: I'm Olivia Carvill. Over the summer, our producer Julia Nutter,
Speaker 3: and I made the drive out to Long Island to
Speaker 3: meet Kayla at her family home.
Speaker 4: I can hear music.
Speaker 1: How are you so nice to see It's nice to
Speaker 1: see you too.
Speaker 4: How are you feeling sound good?
Speaker 1: Let me just do a quick levels check.
Speaker 4: Oh do you want me to put the bird in
Speaker 4: another room?
Speaker 1: I don't even hear the bird. Oh my god, the bird.
Speaker 3: Kayla is like a firecracker. She's small but loud, with
Speaker 3: brightly colored hair. Every time I've seen her, her hair
Speaker 3: is a different color. She's covered in tattoos and piercings.
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, yeah, what kind of bird is that?
Speaker 4: A parrokeet so he likes to talk to himself a lot.
Speaker 3: Do you feel comfortable showing us where you were when
Speaker 3: you discovered the website? When you were showing it, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a little messy. Kayla's twenty four now. When we
Speaker 3: visited her, she was living in the same house she
Speaker 3: grew up in.
Speaker 1: Well, I see all.
Speaker 4: Your plants and it's great, as you could tell. I
Speaker 4: love my books.
Speaker 3: In high school, Kayla was an elite athlete and a
Speaker 3: girl who moved easily between friend groups.
Speaker 4: People make it seem like there's either the popular group
Speaker 4: or you know, so called nerds. I would like to
Speaker 4: say I was in the middle of it because I
Speaker 4: hung out with a lot of the sports people who
Speaker 4: were considered popular. But I had my friends who we
Speaker 4: would just sit around and play video games, hang out,
Speaker 4: do funny things, and make videos of us doing stupid
Speaker 4: little things. I say this to my friends actually all
Speaker 4: the time. I may not dress like it, but my
Speaker 4: inner person is kind of emo. I listen to a
Speaker 4: lot of dark music.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: I have the tattoos all over, I piercings all over,
Speaker 4: and I truly just like It's not like I like
Speaker 4: the color black. I just like I changed a lot.
Speaker 4: I have a really big book tattoo on my leg.
Speaker 4: I have a big wrap around plants because my whole
Speaker 4: leg is going to be things I love, and plants
Speaker 4: is another thing for me. This one, it's one of
Speaker 4: my favorites. It's tell Me About Tomorrow. Tell Me About
Speaker 4: Tomorrow is one of my favorite songs because whenever I'm
Speaker 4: in a depressive stea or just not doing good mentally,
Speaker 4: I play that song and it tells you to tell
Speaker 4: me about tomorrow, tell me about the next day that's
Speaker 4: going to go on in your life. When I was
Speaker 4: going through this situation, I was not mentally doing good
Speaker 4: at all, and it told me you will have tomorrow,
Speaker 4: and you can't have tomorrow.
Speaker 3: It sounds like a lot of the tattoos are important
Speaker 3: to you because they represent you moving forward or healing
Speaker 3: or getting over this situation. As you described it, do
Speaker 3: you feel comfortable getting into now?
Speaker 4: Yes. I remember being in my bed, just laying down.
Speaker 4: It was late at night.
Speaker 3: This was in March twenty twenty, at the onset of
Speaker 3: the COVID pandemic. She'd recently graduated from high school and
Speaker 3: was stuck at home with her appearance.
Speaker 4: I was in that corner. My bed was up against
Speaker 4: the wall. I was just laying in the bed. I'm
Speaker 4: pretty sure I was on my phone, just scrolling through
Speaker 4: Instagram or something, or on Snapchat.
Speaker 3: She heard her dad walking up the stairs from the
Speaker 3: living room, so.
Speaker 4: As I can always hear when someone comes up the
Speaker 4: stairs and he knocks, he always knocks on the door.
Speaker 4: So he knocked and just like walked right in. I
Speaker 4: thought automatically like I was in trouble or something. But
Speaker 4: then I could just like tell like he was just confused,
Speaker 4: and he was like a little hesitant to like come
Speaker 4: up to me. I could tell, and.
Speaker 1: He was just like, what is this?
Speaker 3: What is this? What was he showing you?
Speaker 4: I think it was the website.
Speaker 3: It was the faked picture of her naked and next
Speaker 3: to it a pole asking the site's users to rank
Speaker 3: what they wanted to do to her sexually. This next
Speaker 3: part is graphic and it might be difficult to hear.
Speaker 4: It was. I always had trouble saying these pots.
Speaker 7: It was.
Speaker 4: Drink her purse, milk her have her drink my purse,
Speaker 4: and there was something else, and I can't entirely remember
Speaker 4: what the other one was.
Speaker 3: So they were ranking what they wanted to do to
Speaker 3: you sexually. Yes, yeah, she kept scroll and it got worse.
Speaker 4: We would see what they posted, like their nude pictures
Speaker 4: and them jerking off and coming on our pictures, even
Speaker 4: like pictures of our pictures with their dicks there and
Speaker 4: the ejaculation there, and then there was like some like
Speaker 4: writings of like raper. My dad was very confused. He
Speaker 4: asked me what this was and how did it get
Speaker 4: up there, and I did not know because I've never
Speaker 4: seen it before, which I obviously told him. So that's
Speaker 4: how we found out about the website.
Speaker 3: Kayla says her dad is a big guy, big personality
Speaker 3: like her loud laugh. Back then, he was a police officer,
Speaker 3: a beat cop really for the Nassau County Police Department.
Speaker 3: He didn't want to talk to us for this podcast,
Speaker 3: but he's really protective of his kids, which means he
Speaker 3: regularly googles their names, searching the Internet for anything related
Speaker 3: to them.
Speaker 4: For mere specifically, I was playing soccer and competitively, so
Speaker 4: when I was, you know, going to college and playing soccer.
Speaker 4: Then he just got nervous when they search things. He
Speaker 4: doesn't want dumb to see things are wrong or you know, like.
Speaker 3: Exactly what we found When he shows you the phone,
Speaker 3: what is the photograph on the phone that you're looking
Speaker 3: at the specific that you first see.
Speaker 4: I'm almost passitive. It was the one with the bikini
Speaker 4: taken off my body and it was just me naked,
Speaker 4: well not me, but me with someone else's body parts
Speaker 4: on my body parts that looked exactly like my own.
Speaker 3: Was there ever a moment, even a split seeking moment,
Speaker 3: that you thought it was you naked?
Speaker 4: Yes, I definitely, Like at first, like I was like,
Speaker 4: oh my god, that's me, Like how did they get that?
Speaker 4: But then I was like, no, that's in my friend's backyard.
Speaker 4: Like I was obviously wearing a bikini. And I remember
Speaker 4: the bikini. It was a blue one and it was
Speaker 4: mesh a little bit. So that's why I would think
Speaker 4: it was so easy for them to completely alter the picture.
Speaker 4: But I just like Instantly, I was like, whoa, how
Speaker 4: how did they get that picture of me? Like I
Speaker 4: never took a picture like that. It was frightening how
Speaker 4: exact it looked.
Speaker 3: The website it was on was called come On printed
Speaker 3: picks dot Com, and it encouraged its members to do
Speaker 3: exactly what that title implies, to print out photos of
Speaker 3: girls and young women and masturbate to them, and then
Speaker 3: to post a photo of the user's erection or ejaculation
Speaker 3: on top of that image. This is a practice they
Speaker 3: called tributing.
Speaker 4: To have to see my dad find all that and
Speaker 4: like I don't know, like just not understanding what's going on.
Speaker 4: I didn't even know anything what's going on. And then
Speaker 4: my dad just coming in and seeing all that, It's
Speaker 4: like nobody wants to see that, but like to have
Speaker 4: your dad see that, that's like not even uncomfortable, like
Speaker 4: that's not even the word for it, but just like unimaginable.
Speaker 3: I wish I could tell you that this website was
Speaker 3: tucked away in the dark Web where users needed to
Speaker 3: download a special browser or slink through some other secret
Speaker 3: cyber door. But it wasn't. It was just out in
Speaker 3: the open. Kayla was out in the open too. Postings
Speaker 3: on the site included her real name, which is how
Speaker 3: her dad found it. Sometimes the images posted to the
Speaker 3: website were actual unaltered photos revenge porn type stuff, but
Speaker 3: often the original photos were taken from innocent social media
Speaker 3: posts like Kayla's, and then the site's users turned those
Speaker 3: images into non consensual pornography, often with underage subjects. This
Speaker 3: type of photo manipulation was new to Kayla, but it
Speaker 3: wasn't new to me. I've been starting to see more
Speaker 3: of it over the past few years. I've been reporting
Speaker 3: on big tech and social media platforms what they're doing
Speaker 3: or not doing to prevent harm to kids, what guardrails
Speaker 3: they're putting up to stop exactly this kind of thing
Speaker 3: from happening, and images like these were starting to multiply
Speaker 3: with shocking speed alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. I
Speaker 3: kept hearing more and more about the dark side of
Speaker 3: this new technology, about deep fakes, altered videos online known
Speaker 3: as deep.
Speaker 1: Fakes, the rise of deep fakes.
Speaker 2: Computer generated videos known as deep fakes.
Speaker 6: Deep fake videos make people appear to say things they
Speaker 6: never did or never would.
Speaker 5: But it's getting harder and harder to trust our eyes.
Speaker 3: And errors when I first heard about the leavett Town case.
Speaker 3: I knew the reporting was going to take me to
Speaker 3: some uncomfortable but important places, from the rise of generative
Speaker 3: AI to the explosion of deep fakes to child sexual
Speaker 3: abuse material online. I also knew that it was going
Speaker 3: to be really hard to find the victims and dive
Speaker 3: into this website on my own, so I turned to
Speaker 3: my colleague for help, Margie Murphy. She's a technology reporter
Speaker 3: at Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: At the time, I remember I was reporting on this
Speaker 1: new generative AI tool that people were using to create
Speaker 1: child sexual abuse material. I typically write about people who
Speaker 1: hide on the fringes of the Internet, like teenage hackers
Speaker 1: extorting global businesses, or cyber criminals using AI to scam people.
Speaker 1: Not that long ago, when I started on this beat,
Speaker 1: deepfects weren't that easy to make and kind of always
Speaker 1: had to tell if you looked at them long and
Speaker 1: you would notice something was off, yet they caught your attention.
Speaker 6: With AI, there has been so much.
Speaker 1: Innovation, but in the last few years there have been
Speaker 1: rapid breakthroughs and machine learning.
Speaker 5: Amazon investing up to four billion dollars in startup Anthropic
Speaker 5: as You're.
Speaker 2: Sat reportedly investing ten billion dollars in open AI.
Speaker 1: That is, and truly hundreds of millions of dollars has
Speaker 1: flowed into image generating software powered by AI.
Speaker 2: Microsoft, Amazon, you name it. They are all actively investing
Speaker 2: in young AI startups because you're tried.
Speaker 1: That has made it a lot cheaper and easier to
Speaker 1: make convincing photos or videos of pretty much anything you
Speaker 1: can think of. Now, there are billions upon billions of
Speaker 1: deep fake images out there, and this probably won't surprise you,
Speaker 1: but the vast, vast majority, by one estimate, more than
Speaker 1: ninety percent of all deep fake imagery is pornographic. Typically,
Speaker 1: people who have had their image turned into porn have
Speaker 1: not consented to having their faces, bodies, or voices morphed
Speaker 1: in this way. A lot of people don't even know
Speaker 1: that these images of themselves exist. But as Olivia and
Speaker 1: I learned, Kayla's dad had found this website in a
Speaker 1: regular search of her name, and now he and Kayla
Speaker 1: knew it was there.
Speaker 4: Seeing what people had to say about my body as
Speaker 4: the pictures were like when I'm what thirteen fourteen, I
Speaker 4: think I instantly cried. I was just like I think
Speaker 4: I remember kind of like stating more to myself than
Speaker 4: anybody else, Like why is this happening to me? Like
Speaker 4: what is going on? Like is this even real life?
Speaker 4: I felt betrayed by my body because it felt so real,
Speaker 4: Like the pictures just seemed so real.
Speaker 1: The website he uses also encouraged each other to on
Speaker 1: the images and even harass the person being pictured.
Speaker 4: It's unimaginable to think that people can even say how gross,
Speaker 4: like to tell you to rape me or milk me.
Speaker 4: I remember a lot of mine was with my braces,
Speaker 4: because I had braces until I was in eleventh grade,
Speaker 4: and then I had some pimples, and I would see
Speaker 4: people saying that they loved my brace face and my
Speaker 4: pimples on my face. They like, I'm younger.
Speaker 3: Did you actively search through the website for all photos
Speaker 3: of you and look at other photos on there and
Speaker 3: what the people were saying, or did you just could
Speaker 3: you just not look at it at all?
Speaker 4: No? I constantly looked at it. I was searching to
Speaker 4: see if there were new pictures that would be uploaded.
Speaker 3: After learning about the website, Kayla's biggest question was who
Speaker 3: did this? Who went through the trouble of scraping her
Speaker 3: pictures from social media, editing them to make her look
Speaker 3: naked and then posting them on this site asking others
Speaker 3: to harass her. She wanted it to stop, so she
Speaker 3: took a break from Visco, a photo sharing app.
Speaker 4: Because I started to notice that was the mean place
Speaker 4: that they took my pictures from.
Speaker 3: I mean, for you, you can't unsee that that's your
Speaker 3: body and that's someone putting it out there naked on
Speaker 3: this website. How do you survive and how do you cope?
Speaker 4: I quite literally just put in the back of my
Speaker 4: head and moved on and just did not think about it,
Speaker 4: trying not to think about it. We're still on lockdown,
Speaker 4: so I was stuck with my thoughts a lot. But
Speaker 4: I was also stuck with my family. We all kind
Speaker 4: of just put it in the back of our heads
Speaker 4: and essentially basically pretended that it never happened.
Speaker 1: Kayla didn't tell anyone about it, not even her friends,
Speaker 1: though her father reached out to his colleagues at the
Speaker 1: Nasau County Police Department. He wanted to know what could
Speaker 1: they do to help Kayla.
Speaker 4: My dad did seek advice to his buddies at work.
Speaker 4: He did ask if there was anything that they could
Speaker 4: do but his buddies really didn't know how to go
Speaker 4: about it because it's so hard to trace, like those
Speaker 4: types of websites when they're all anonymous and they're essentially
Speaker 4: a porn website, so it's really hard to trace those
Speaker 4: back to the original owner or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Bear in mind, this was happening in twenty twenty, when
Speaker 1: the term deep fakes wasn't as widespread or recognized as
Speaker 1: it is now, and there weren't any laws, fred rule
Speaker 1: or in New York State at this time to prevent
Speaker 1: faked pornographic images of real people.
Speaker 4: I didn't really know what there was to do after
Speaker 4: my dad already tried to contact the police department and
Speaker 4: his buddies and them just telling us that, like, there
Speaker 4: really was not much that they can do going through
Speaker 4: a complete and trying to go through all the steps
Speaker 4: that it took. I just don't think I was I
Speaker 4: was strong enough at that moment.
Speaker 3: And there's more time passed. Can you describe how your
Speaker 3: feelings about their website and those photos changed.
Speaker 4: I think after some time I stopped looking at the
Speaker 4: website put in the back of my head, but it
Speaker 4: completely altered the way that I thought about my body,
Speaker 4: and there's thing called body dysmorphia. Your brain alters the
Speaker 4: way that you look at your body, and I completely
Speaker 4: went through that. I used to feel so confident about
Speaker 4: it because I was an athlete. I felt so in
Speaker 4: tune with my body, and then I completely changed. I
Speaker 4: started having eating issues and wasn't able to eat full meals.
Speaker 4: I would feel sick after eating. I couldn't even eat
Speaker 4: three bites of food. I would eat two bites and
Speaker 4: feel absolutely disgusted in what I'm eating and disgusted in
Speaker 4: my body for wanting food. It completely changed just who
Speaker 4: I was as a person. I completely got depressed and
Speaker 4: just wasn't myself.
Speaker 1: And that's where the story could have ended, with Kayla's
Speaker 1: faked pictures still online and her and her dad not
Speaker 1: able to do anything about it. Her small, safe, suburban
Speaker 1: world turned upside down. But ten months later, Kayla's phone rang.
Speaker 4: I got a call when I was looking at my
Speaker 4: old job at a clothing store. It was around New
Speaker 4: Year's Eve. I remember it was like seven forty and
Speaker 4: I was behind the register. It was very quiet in
Speaker 4: the store, so I was just on my phone. We
Speaker 4: weren't really supposed to be on our phones. But I
Speaker 4: just remember being on my phone and I see one
Speaker 4: of the classmates. It was her dad's name popped up
Speaker 4: on my phone, which was so weird to me because
Speaker 4: I was like, I don't even have this number, why
Speaker 4: are they calling me? And I just remember the last name.
Speaker 4: And I answered and I was like hello, and she's like, Hi,
Speaker 4: this is blank. She goes, I saw you on the website.
Speaker 4: I just want to let you know I'm also on
Speaker 4: this website. And I remember just like walking away from
Speaker 4: the register and I was just like, okay, like how
Speaker 4: many other people are on there? Who do you think
Speaker 4: it is? And that's when she said, I figured out
Speaker 4: who it was. I think.
Speaker 3: In an instant. Kayla's story got so much bigger from there.
Speaker 3: It would stretch beyond her bedroom, past the high school
Speaker 3: out of Leavertown, across the country, and around the world.
Speaker 1: What she didn't and couldn't know, but what Olivia and
Speaker 1: I would learn through our investigation was that there was
Speaker 1: a global web of cyber criminals taking advantage of a
Speaker 1: plodding justice system being pursued by online vigilantes and hackers
Speaker 1: willing to take risks the cops and prosecutors wouldn't. The
Speaker 1: story took us from New York to small town New Zealand,
Speaker 1: through the darkest corners of the Internet, back into bedroom
Speaker 1: rooms of mid century homes lined up in neat little roads.
Speaker 1: This season on Levett Town.
Speaker 6: There are things you don't want to believe about your friends.
Speaker 6: You kind of think that the people in your circle
Speaker 6: area like you put them on a pedestal.
Speaker 7: This individual was just out to ruin their lives for
Speaker 7: no reason. There was a very new type of crime
Speaker 7: where there was a gray area to say.
Speaker 4: You have certain police officers there will wait for calls
Speaker 4: that come in and then now go and respond to
Speaker 4: those courts.
Speaker 3: I'm the person that will go and hunt people.
Speaker 5: They call it an arms race between law enforcement and technology,
Speaker 5: and it's just where wells we are absolutely losing.
Speaker 3: This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and
Speaker 3: me Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscope, Led by Julia Nutter,
Speaker 3: edited by Nita Tuluis Semnani, Producing by Dara luck Potts,
Speaker 3: Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by
Speaker 3: Steve bone leavittown archival clips provided by Screen Ocean Clips
Speaker 3: and footage our Bloomberg editors are Caitlyn Kenney and Jeff Grocock.
Speaker 3: Additional reporting by Samantha Stewart. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's executive
Speaker 3: producer and head of Podcasting. Kristin Powers is our senior
Speaker 3: executive editor. From iHeart, our executive producers are Tyler Klang
Speaker 3: and Nicki Etoor. Leavittown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope
Speaker 3: and iHeart Podcasts. If you liked this show, give us
Speaker 3: a follow and tell your friends.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm.