4chan's ‘Deepfakes’ of Celebrity Women Seem to Spike When Women Make Headlines
Activity in 4chan's “Adult Requests” board suggests “deepfake” targeting of female celebrities may rise as their public profiles do
TLDR
Generative AI software’s rapid technological advancement and increased accessibility has accelerated the production and spread of digitally generated images depicting others in sexually explicit ways (often referred to as “deepfakes”). This form of online sex abuse overwhelmingly targets women, and sometimes children.
Open Measures examined historical data for 4chan’s “Adult Requests” imageboard, one of the internet’s largest fountains of nonconsensual deepfakes, for mentions of three female celebrities frequently targeted by the board’s users.
Our researchers found that periods where Adult Requests users requested explicit deepfakes of the three female celebrities often overlapped with periods when the women were receiving above average media exposure that boosted their public profiles.
Background
Policymakers around the world have sounded alarms over the use of generative AI software to inflict acts of online sexual abuse,1 including the creation of sexually explicit and nonconsensual “deepfakes”: digitally generated images and videos intended to look authentic.2 The vast majority of individuals victimized by nonconsensual deepfakes are female3 – including children, in some cases.4 Legal efforts to address the issue have severely lagged behind the rapid development and accessibility of generative AI software.5
Open Measures previously reported on “Adult Requests,” a growing, pornography-centered community on 4chan where users are almost singularly focused on the production and consumption of sexually explicit deepfakes. Most threads on the board include user-submitted images of people – typically women and girls – with requests for others to make AI-generated images depicting them in nude and pornographic scenes. These requests, and the images other users create to fulfill them, are viewable to anyone who visits the board.
Adult Requests users frequently victimize high-profile individuals, including celebrities, politicians, and athletes. But even more request threads seem to target women that users have encountered online or in their personal lives. Today, the board is one of the internet’s most active and dedicated hubs for this form of online sexual abuse.
Open Measures has recorded more than 624,000 posts made on 4chan’s Adult Requests board in the last year. Around a quarter of those posts contained a keyword related to requests for non-consensual sexual images.
Our Approach
We sought to determine whether Adult Requests users were more likely to victimize famous women when their public profiles had recently been elevated, whether by making news headlines or becoming the subjects of viral online discussions.
Using Open Measures’ platform, our researchers searched for posts made on Adult Requests in the last year mentioning three female celebrities they had seen users discussing in previous research: musical artist Billie Eilish, US Congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and actress Sydney Sweeney. Our researchers created simple search queries for each of the women above, using our platform’s Timeline feature to chart their mentions over the last year. For further analysis, we reviewed the results we surfaced using our Discover tool.
Since a comprehensive picture of interest in one figure across the broader internet is difficult to reduce to any single data point, our researchers’ approach was to work backwards: Upon seeing a period of increased activity in an individual on Adult Requests, they then reviewed a range of news and web analytics sources for context on the individual’s relative amount of public awareness or exposure during the same period.
Analysis
For each of the celebrities included in this analysis, our researchers identified distinct periods during which their names were mentioned more frequently on Adult Requests. Upon closer review, we saw that the majority of these mentions appeared in posts requesting sexually explicit deepfakes of those individuals.
Note: Adult Requests is an imageboard forum where users converse in threads. Open Measures’ search query only identified mentions of each individual where they appeared in text posts, meaning that the totals included in our analysis likely reflect only a portion of the activity associated with each figure.
Billie Eilish
Adult Requests users shared at least 114 posts mentioning musical artist Billie Eilish last year, more than half of which were recorded between Dec. 21, 2025, and Jan. 22, 2026. During that period, the day with the highest number of posts mentioning Eilish was Dec. 27, 2025.
While our researchers were unable to identify any single event that triggered a surge in deepfake requests of Eilish, Eilish was experiencing a period of heightened publicity that aligned with observed activity spikes – after receiving nominations for Grammy awards, hosting an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” and sharing a trailer for her upcoming concert documentary film.
When reviewing posts from the surge period, researchers identified one post from Adult Requests on Jan. 5 that included a link to low-rank adaptation models (LoRAs), shareable files used to alter a generative AI model’s settings for a specific use case. In that post, the user linked to LoRA models for creating images of Eilish and actress Jennifer Lawrence specifically, indicating that they recently “got a v2” (i.e., had been updated or improved).
![A 4chan post made on the Adult Requests board chart on Jan. 5, 2026, and archived in Open Measures’ datasets shows a user sharing a hyperlink to a low-rank adaptation model for creating sexually explicit AI-generated images of celebrity women. The post reads [sic]: “New zimage loras, and as usual I know none of these people: [link redacted]. Billie Eilish and jlaw got a v2.”](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VImm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F57f26dc4-0f4c-4ec1-87a1-cfddd4a7d863_1710x392.png "A 4chan post made on the Adult Requests board chart on Jan. 5, 2026, and archived in Open Measures’ datasets shows a user sharing a hyperlink to a low-rank adaptation model for creating sexually explicit AI-generated images of celebrity women. The post reads [sic]: “New zimage loras, and as usual I know none of these people: [link redacted]. Billie Eilish and jlaw got a v2.”")
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
At least 112 posts on Adult Requests made last year mentioned Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, often in requests for fake images that depict her in pornographic images. Using the Timeline feature, our researchers saw that the daily totals of posts mentioning Ocasio-Cortez spiked throughout December 2025 and January 2026.
While users did not explicitly mention news coverage in the posts we identified, the spiking requests for sexually explicit deepfakes of Ocasio-Cortez we identified closely correlated with a period of increased media attention on the congresswoman. Around that time, Ocasio-Cortez made news headlines for introducing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani at his inauguration ceremony, predicting that she’d “stomp” Vice President JD Vance if she challenged him in a hypothetical 2028 presidential election matchup, and demanding prosecutions of federal immigration enforcement officers who killed Minneapolis residents.
Our researchers identified the greatest single-day spike in mentions of Ocasio-Cortez on Jan. 7, when footage of Ocasio-Cortez confronting a Fox News producer over a network host’s sexualized commentary about her was widely circulating on social media. It is unclear whether the spike in requests for explicit deepfakes of Ocasio-Cortez was directly influenced by the viral video clip.
Sydney Sweeney
Adult Requests users mentioned actress Sydney Sweeney in at least 77 posts over the last year, most of which were shared in the last few months. Our researchers saw that the board’s users began mentioning Sweeney more frequently beginning in February and peaking in April.
The greatest single-day spike our researchers identified in requests for explicit deepfakes of Sweeney occurred on April 16, 2026. Similar to Eilish and Ocasio-Cortez, Adult Requests users did not explicitly cite their motivations for requesting for deepfakes. Around the same time, however, clothing company American Eagle debuted its second advertising campaign featuring Sweeney, following on from a similar campaign last year that stirred online outrage. The actress also made headlines in recent months for red-carpet appearances at Hollywood events and for her romantic relationship with music industry executive Scooter Braun.
As in Eilish’s case, the posts mentioning Sweeney that our researchers reviewed also included discussion of LoRAs. In one post made to Adult Requests on Jan. 8, a user stated that they had LoRAs for a handful of celebrity women, including Sweeney, “ready to go if anyone wants something of them.”
Conclusion
Open Measures saw Adult Requests users requesting explicit deepfakes of the three female celebrities in our analysis more often in periods that overlapped with increased public interest in those figures. While our findings do not prove a causal relationship, they do suggest that women experiencing heightened levels of online and media visibility may also face a heightened risk of being targeted as subjects for nonconsensual deepfakes.
Open Measures’ information from 4chan’s Adult Requests board is among the most-complete archive of its kind, and our proprietary tools allow users to further investigate the activity on the board (and to minimize their exposure to graphic and potentially illegal material while doing so).
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Mithani, J. (2025, May 19). Take It Down Act: How to use it to remove revenge porn. The 19th. Here.
Tenbarge, K. (2024, Aug. 20). DEFIANCE Act passes in the Senate, potentially allowing deepfake victims to sue over nonconsensual images. NBCNews.com. Here.
Ibid.