How to Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole: Mapping the Ecosystem of Technologies Facilitating AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Images

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04759v1
• Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:58:05 GMT
• Title: How to Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole: Mapping the Ecosystem of Technologies Facilitating AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Images
• Authors: Michelle L. Ding, Harini Suresh, Suresh Venkatasubramanian,
• Abstract summary: AIG-NCII is a form of image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately harms women and girls.<n>There is a patchwork of commendable efforts across industry, policy, academia, and civil society to address AIG-NCII.<n>We contribute the first comprehensive AIG-NCII technological ecosystem that maps and taxonomizes 11 categories of technologies.
• Score: 2.9855784955026805
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The last decade has witnessed a rapid advancement of generative AI technology that significantly scaled the accessibility of AI-generated non-consensual intimate images (AIG-NCII), a form of image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately harms women and girls. There is a patchwork of commendable efforts across industry, policy, academia, and civil society to address AIG-NCII. However, these efforts lack a shared, consistent mental model that situates the technologies they target within the context of a large, interconnected, and ever-evolving technological ecosystem. As a result, interventions remain siloed and are difficult to evaluate and compare, leading to a reactive cycle of whack-a-mole. We contribute the first comprehensive AIG-NCII technological ecosystem that maps and taxonomizes 11 categories of technologies facilitating the creation, distribution, proliferation and discovery, infrastructural support, and monetization of AIG-NCII. First, we build and visualize the ecosystem through a synthesis of over a hundred primary sources from researchers, journalists, advocates, policymakers, and technologists. Next, we demonstrate how stakeholders can use the ecosystem as a tool to 1) understand new incidents of harm via a case study of Grok and 2) evaluate existing interventions via three more case studies. We conclude with three actionable recommendations, namely that stakeholders should 1) use the ecosystem to map out state, federal, and international laws to produce a clearer policy landscape, 2) collectively develop a database that dynamically tracks the 11 technologies in the ecosystem to better evaluate interventions, and 3) adopt a relational approach to researching AIG-NCII to better understand how the ecosystem technologies interact.

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