BONUS SERIES: Levittown Episode 6 | Warp Speed

The episode opens by comparing today’s technology race with Levittown’s earlier innovation. William J. Levitt’s company reduced mass-produced homebuilding to 26 assembly-line steps and could build a house in a day, but the 1947 development excluded Black families through restrictive covenants. Nassau County Detective Devin Ross says his own work has moved from VCRs, tape-fed camcorders, and 8mm audio cassettes to cybercrime, fraud, extortion, and deepfakes. Law enforcement and legislators are “absolutely losing,” he says: crimes they are addressing six weeks later may already be 10 months ahead technologically.

Margie Murphy and Olivia Carville test a popular nudifying site, Draw Nudes, which received more than 12 million visits in the first half of 2024. Without entering a name or email, Margie uploads a desert-running photograph, paints over her sports bra and shorts, selects the automatic option, and receives a photorealistic nude image within seconds. In 2019, Patrick Carey had to create collages by combining faces and bodies with rudimentary AI; now an app performs the equivalent in a few swipes. Margie says the result was proportionally correct and looked completely real.

The reporters describe the experience as surreal and uncomfortable, even though Margie knowingly created the image and understood what would happen. They contrast that with victims who never consented and may learn that an intimate-looking image was made for someone else’s pleasure. The episode calls this a new kind of violence. Federal law did not then generally criminalize creating and sharing deepfake pornography based on adults, while protections for children applied narrowly to child-abuse cases. At least 25 states had attempted their own laws, but federal law protected hosting platforms from liability for user-posted content.

Detective Laurel Beer, one of only two investigators in her Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, department, receives a case after a student accidentally shares a deepfake in a group text. The images came from a female classmate’s social-media account and had circulated privately through Discord. Using a warrant for online records and chats, Beer built spreadsheets, checked images against a yearbook, interviewed witnesses, and contacted families. She ultimately identified 60 victims, 59 minors. She says most perpetrators know their victims. The suspects face felony charges including sexual abuse of children and disseminating child sexual-abuse material, and will be tried as minors.

School officials first received an anonymous tip in November 2023 that a student had made AI nude images of classmates, but an internal investigation failed to corroborate it and police were not contacted. After a second tip, a suspect withdrew and the school reported the matter to the state child-abuse agency; police learned of it only after a mother came forward in spring 2024. In November 2024, hundreds of students and faculty walked out, classes were cancelled, and students said girls felt unsafe. Parents sued, while the school cited student care, policy review, staff training, and mandatory-reporting training.

Beer says the accused students may receive detention or treatment for sexualized behavior, with rehabilitation intended to prevent conduct continuing into adulthood. The episode argues that perpetrators are often the same age as their victims and that increasingly intuitive tools are reaching children as they begin forming ideas about sexuality. Instead of finding existing pornography, teenagers can manufacture images of classmates in private bedrooms, without immediate supervision or understanding of psychological and legal consequences. Beer warns that viewing sexual images of children one’s own age can seem less wrong to users, but remains child pornography; nudify apps now let them create those images themselves.

The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan 2024 bill that would have made making and distributing non-consensual deepfake pornography a federal offense and required platforms to remove reported images within 48 hours. Meta, Google, and TikTok supported it, but the bill died in the House; supporters planned to reintroduce it. State laws vary: some protect only victims under 18, while New York expanded revenge-porn statutes but may require proof of intent. Pennsylvania later expanded unlawful-dissemination rules to cover deepfakes. The episode describes the resulting protections as patchwork, uneven, and untested.

City Attorney David Chiu says San Francisco filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in August 2024 against 16 heavily visited sites that create and distribute AI-generated non-consensual pornography. The suit alleges violations of federal and state revenge-porn and child-pornography statutes and California’s unfair-competition law. The sites collectively received more than 200 million visits during the first six months of 2024, charge users to generate images, and sometimes advertise their non-consensual purpose. Chiu says the lawsuit seeks to shut them down and argues that internet-service providers, search engines, authenticators, and payment processors can also help make the services unworkable.

The reporters pay $8 for Draw Nudes’ premium service and find that payment requires a live chat, a special account link, a PayPal transfer, and sending the transaction ID before credits are added. They say the process may hide the operators and evade payment companies that ban such services. A marketer named Cyril, apparently a Ukrainian man in his early 30s, is linked to the site through his company Sol Ecom. Cyril says Draw Nudes’ developers were two men, one Russian in Cyprus and one Belarusian in the United States, and denies that Sol Ecom owned or was paid by the app. He later stops responding.

Draw Nudes went offline at the end of 2024, but the reporters find Cloth Off, with almost 27 million visitors in the prior year, and Undress App using nearly identical interfaces, graphics, wording, support systems, and links. The pattern suggests shell sites may route users toward a smaller group of operators while domain changes obscure ownership. Apple and Google have banned some products from app stores, but the sites remain searchable. Meta says the ads violate its rules and removes them when detected, yet operators repeatedly return under new domains; reports indicate Facebook and Instagram drive nearly 90% of some apps’ traffic.

David Chiu says open-source versions and special prompts can bypass guardrails from companies such as Stability AI and Midjourney, while Meta continues fighting constantly changing advertisements. He worries about his eight-year-old son growing up amid altered sexual norms and says AI-facilitated exploitation could warp an entire generation if officials do not act quickly. Cecilia, a Levittown survivor, says regulation is urgently needed so others do not experience the trauma she did. Patrick Carey was released early in August 2023 after four months in prison; Cecilia and Kayla still encounter him. Kayla says speaking publicly is painful but worth it if it helps force change.