Britain's ad regulator bans five AI app ads for sexualising women

Somebody at each of these apps chose the demo clip. For the app the ASA identified only as KH31 DD22, the clip showed a clothed woman being turned into a video in which she was topless, and the watchdog said that suggested the app could be used to create content exposing women's bodies ^[5]. The PictoPop ad used sexualised imagery to demonstrate the tool, including portraying the woman in a submissive position ^[6]. Ads for Rusto AI encouraged users to make sexualised videos from photographs ^[7].

It is the ad that gets judged. The ASA said the five banned ads had depicted women irresponsibly and were likely to cause serious or widespread offence ^[8]. The test applies to the creative asset: what the demo shows happening, and whose picture the hook asks the viewer to supply. Nexaipic's two ads asked for the viewer's crush ^[4].

The legal position moved underneath the investigation. The UK outlawed apps for creating non-consensual deepfake nude imagery a few months ago, after anger over X's chatbot Grok complying with requests to nudify images of women on the platform ^[9]. The ASA said the law had changed during its investigations, that ads identified in future would be considered in light of both the law and its own rules, and that where ads are illegal it may notify platforms and law enforcement ^[10].

None of the apps' creators responded to the ASA's enquiries ^[11]. Meta had already removed the ads for breaching its own rules before the ASA acted ^[12]. For an advertiser that never answers a letter, the enforceable part of this runs through the ad platform and through the ASA's AI-powered Active Ad Monitoring System, which proactively searches for ads that might break UK rules and found these ones ^[13]. "We take a firm line on ads that are likely to cause serious or widespread offence and these ads are a clear example of why that matters," said Nicky Baker of the ASA ^[14].

Five rulings sit against a much larger volume. Meta has said it removed more than 344,000 ads for nudifying apps across Facebook and Instagram between November 2025 and January 2026 ^[15]. Across the 92 days in that window, that is roughly 3,700 ads a day ^[1]. 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, most of which Meta removed automatically ^[16]. Many of them promoted domains or publishers that his site Indicator had previously flagged to the company, he said ^[17]. Meta declined to comment and pointed to action it has already taken on nudification apps, including new technology to detect ads and legal action ^[18].

The BBC's account gives the count as five ads, then itemises at least six: one for Animcha, two for Nexaipic, one for KH31 DD22, one for PictoPop and further ads for Rusto AI ^[2].

If you are the person signing off paid social for an AI image or video tool, two questions carry the risk. Whose image does the ad tell the viewer to upload, and what does the demo show being done to that image. An ad that answers "someone you know" and "clothes come off" fails on the creative whatever the app's own terms permit. There is a third checkpoint, the one Animcha hit: sexualised imagery combined with childlike clothing and objects, on a synthetic character presented as someone users could "customise" and instruct, was enough for the ASA to find the ad portrayed someone under 18 in a sexual way ^[3].