A Sydney startup built an AI porn giant. It could be generating child abuse material

Some characters on AI porn site OurDream appear to depict people under 16 years old, according to technology used by law enforcement. (ABC News) Link copiedShareShare articleCoreflow is a little-known company, but its job ads promise eye-watering salaries. Warning: This story includes a description of sexual violence and references to child abuse material. The tech startup, based in Sydney, offers up to $450,000 a year for someone to join its "growth" team and help get its AI product to "hundreds of millions of users". For an engineer, it's paying up to $800,000 a year. In its ads, the company boasts of attaining 20 million users worldwide since launching last year, and staff call it "the Netflix of AI". The startup has serious ambition: to bring about a revolution in entertainment, where users don't just consume but create their own highly personalised content. What its job listings don't mention is that the entertainment is pornography. Coreflow is recruiting engineers to help run what's been ranked as the biggest AI porn website on the internet, OurDream. The website has strict prohibited content protocols and says it prioritises safety. It explicitly bans copyrighted characters, deepfakes, and — crucially — content depicting children. OurDream's site contains a page listing several categories of prohibited content. (Supplied) One of the categories prohibited by the website relates to depictions of character under 18 years. (Supplied) But when the ABC looked into the rapidly growing startup, it found its technology was producing disturbing results. The ABC identified 11 female AI-generated "companions" on the site that appeared to be 15 years old or younger, according to age-estimation technology. The adolescent-looking avatars aren't real people. But Colm Gannon from the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) said there was real harm in people engaging with them. What started as a story about the rise of a new AI empire became an investigation into whether the website could be breaching laws against child sex abuse material. Within weeks, police were at the ABC to investigate the material uncovered. OurDream's promise to customers is simple: use the power of artificial intelligence to bring your fantasies to life. Its huge customer base has vaulted it into the top 50 AI sites globally, with the site generating more unique monthly visits in January than Google Labs and Meta AI. The website is heavily advertised on social media and other pornography websites. One user, Matt, a man in his 40s who lives in the US, says it "feels almost like a choose-your-own adventure novel". "I have a job and a life so this is for me to keep myself entertained," he says. Matt says he uses the website in the hour between when his family goes to bed and he does. "It does what AI does … it engages you and so you can feel rather addicted to it," he says. "You can certainly spend a lot of your life on this if you really wanted to." Users can build their AI companions from scratch, choosing everything from their body to their backstory. Or they can pick from a library of companions built by other users, and approved by OurDream. The site carries character profiles with head shots, age, gender and backgrounds. There's a 55-year-old corrupt Democratic senator from the American south who "controls a web of dark money", an elite Brazilian competitive swimmer chasing her Olympic dream, and a young woman who users supposedly meet at a Queensland McDonald's. For $170 a year, customers can generate explicit images, videos, and unlimited conversations with the AI companions. Matt says the companions often look realistic, more like a photo of a real person than an AI image. And that made it "deeply unsettling" when he noticed some user-generated videos seemed to breach the website's rules against violent content. He remembers seeing one in which an AI character was pepper sprayed. "She was tied up and sprayed in the eyes, and then rather violently set upon," he says. He reported the content to moderators, but it "continued popping up for days". "I think the last time I sent in [a complaint] I just typed in the little comment box: 'Who is making this? Why are they on this site?'" he says. And when the ABC went digging through the website, it didn't take long to find material that raised the question of whether police needed to be informed. The first character was a female from the Philippines, whose image sat on OurDream's public-facing home page, which features only fully clothed characters in non-explicit depictions. It looks like a photo of a girl in her early teens. The ABC showed the image to ICMEC's Colm Gannon. "Straight away there's alarm bells ringing here," he said. Mr Gannon ran the picture through Rigr — an online age estimation tool used by governments and law enforcement in more than 20 countries to assess the ages of minors appearing in images. Rigr assessed

A Sydney startup built an AI porn giant. It could be generating child abuse material

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A Sydney startup built an AI porn giant. It could be generating child abuse material

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