Meta deleted 344,000 ads for apps that undress people. Then a regulator started hunting them itself
Five ads for AI apps have been banned in the UK. One of them used a sexualised image of a girl under 18 to sell an AI companion app.
Imagine a photo of you — fully clothed, posted years ago — being fed into an app that turns it into a topless video. That was the actual pitch in one of the ads running on Facebook and Instagram, and the UK's Advertising Standards Authority has now banned it along with four others.
The ASA said the five ads objectified and sexualised women, including through harmful gender stereotypes. Two of them, for a tool called Nexaipic, told people to "upload your crush and let AI create what you imagine", with sexually explicit videos. Another, for an app identified only as KH31 DD22, showed a clothed woman turning into a video where she was topless. Ads for Rusto AI encouraged users to make sexualised videos from photographs. An ad for PictoPop used sexualised imagery, including portraying a woman in a submissive position. And one ad for an AI companion generator from Animcha Ltd was found to have portrayed someone under 18 in a sexual way — a synthetic female character users could "customise" and instruct, dressed with childlike clothing and objects. None of the apps' creators replied when the ASA got in touch.
The number to hold on to isn't five. It's 344,000 — the ads for nudifying apps Meta says it removed from Facebook and Instagram between November 2025 and January 2026. That is what this industry looks like from the inside of an ad system: not a dark corner of the internet, but paid placements bidding for space next to your friends' holiday photos. Researcher Alexios Mantzarlis reported in early September that an investigation found 11,336 ads on Meta's platforms claiming they could turn images of clothed people into sexually explicit videos.
Here is the part that changes things. The ASA didn't find these five by waiting for someone to complain. It found them with its own "Active Ad Monitoring System", an AI tool that goes looking for rule-breaking ads on its own. Meanwhile the law moved underneath the case: the UK outlawed apps that create non-consensual deepfake nude imagery only months ago, after outrage over X's chatbot Grok complying with requests to nudify images of women on the platform. The ASA says the law changed while it was still investigating, and that future ads will be judged against both the law and its own rules — and where an ad looks illegal, it may tell platforms and law enforcement.
So the machine that found the ads now has a phone line to the police.
That matters because the economics of these apps depend on cheap distribution. A nudify app doesn't need a shop or a brand — it needs to be seen. Take away the ability to advertise on the two biggest social platforms without consequence, and the cost of running one goes up. Nicky Baker of the ASA put the harm plainly: encouraging "the objectification of women and the creation of explicit content from people's images has the potential to cause real-world harm".
Anyone whose face is online in a photo they didn't think twice about — which is most people under 40. The ads specifically invited strangers to upload an image of their "crush", so the target isn't a celebrity, it's a classmate, a colleague, someone from a dating app. It also touches parents and teenagers directly: one banned ad sexualised a character portrayed as under 18, and it was running as a normal paid ad on Instagram, not hidden away. And it touches anyone who builds or markets consumer apps in the UK — the regulator now scans ads automatically and says it may pass illegal ones to law enforcement.
The ASA said ads identified in future will be considered in light of both the new law and its own rules, and that where ads are illegal it may notify platforms and law enforcement. Whether any of that turns into an actual case is the thing to watch — the ASA named no timeline, and none of the app makers behind these five ads answered its enquiries at all. Meta declined to comment.
None of the five developers replied to the regulator. Not a denial, not an excuse — silence. Which tells you something about how much an ad ban costs a business that can be renamed and relaunched by Friday.
Sources: BBC News, Chris Vallance, "AI app ads promoting 'objectification of women' banned by watchdog" (BBC Technology).
Реклама приложений, раздевающих фото любой женщины со снимка, крутилась в Facebook и Instagram десятками тысяч штук — сам Meta признал удаление 344 тысяч таких объявлений за три месяца, и теперь британский регулятор начал ловить их автоматически и обещает передавать дела полиции.
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