Roughly one in 14 adults in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States says someone has made, shared or threatened to share sexually explicit images of them created with artificial intelligence, according to a new peer-reviewed study.
Henry et al. surveyed over 7,000 people across three regions to better understand the prevalence, nature, and impacts of AI-generated image-based sexual abuse.
“The findings revealed the extent of the abuse across the wider community,” said Professor Nicola Henry, a researcher at RMIT University.
“We now have evidence of how widely AI-generated image-based abuse is affecting people across the community, not just celebrities and public figures.”
“The true scale may be even greater because some people may never know that AI-generated images of them have been created or shared.”
In the study, Professor Henry and her colleagues surveyed a total of 7,230 adults in July and August 2024.
Overall, 15.1% reported at least one experience of abuse involving digitally altered intimate images, including both AI-generated fakes and those made by other editing methods.
About 7%, or roughly one in 14, said AI was specifically involved.
The researchers found that 4.3% of respondents said someone had created AI-generated intimate images of them without consent, 4.4% said such images had been shared, and 3.6% said they had been threatened with sharing, a tactic often used in sextortion schemes.
Rates were highest in Britain (9.3%), followed by Australia (7.7%) and the United States (6.5%).
Victimization was higher among people under 35, LGBTQ+ respondents, people of color, and people with disabilities.
Among those who had been victimized, 90.3% reported at least one negative feeling, and 86.7% reported at least one negative impact on their lives.
Women were more likely than men to report exclusively negative reactions (87.6% versus 71.2%) and were more likely to report feeling afraid for their safety (42.4% versus 18.1%), sad, or depressed. Women were also more likely to report mental health impacts.
Men were significantly more likely than women to report neutral or positive reactions, such as finding the images funny, though such responses were uncommon overall.
Most victims, 55.6%, said the perpetrator was someone they had known only online.
Nearly 30% said they had interacted with the person in person, and 14.6% did not know who was responsible.
Asked to describe the relationship, the most common answer was ‘stranger,’ at 21.4%, followed by friend (14.2%) and former partner (9.2%).
Perpetrators were most often reported to be men (47.4%), though 36.7% of victims named a woman. The authors caution that this could partly reflect scammers who pose as women online.
“As generative AI becomes more widely available, there is greater potential for these tools to be misused to create, share or threaten to share intimate images without consent,” Professor Henry said.
“What we don’t yet know is how quickly that is translating into increased victimization.”
The findings were published on September 8, 2026 in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.
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Nicola Henry et al. ‘That Experience Still Haunts Me to This Day’: A Multi-Region Survey on AI-Generated Image-Based Sexual Abuse Victimization. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, published online September 8, 2026; doi: 10.1080/10447318.2026.2723677
