AI Kissing Apps: The Deepfake Trend Parents Need to Know About
I’m rarely one to flinch at a new risky viral trend or platform, but this new one has stopped me dead in my tracks: TikTok and Instagram are running thousands of ads for AI-powered kissing apps (yes, really).
Now at first, the idea of watching your celebrity crush kiss you, or fulfilling the fantasy of your high school sweetheart caressing you might seem like harmless entertainment, but it’s so much more than that.
Let’s get into it.
How Do These Apps Work?
It’s scary how easy it is: you upload a picture of two people to this app and within seconds, the app will AI-generate a deepfake kissing video. It’s hyper-realistic and it might sound impressive at first from a tech perspective, but it raises major ethical concerns
When we define digital consent, we are often looking at permission to post someone’s image, permission to add someone on a platform, or permission to share or keep an intimate image.
But what about the permission to manipulate someone’s digital image and then controlling its behaviour?
Thanks to AI, we now need to expand our definition of digital consent.
We would never force someone to do something physically against their will. Making someone kiss you without their consent is considered sexual assault. This should be no different. Whether in person or through AI, manipulating someone’s body—digital or not—is inappropriate and non-consensual.
The more these ads are run so casually, the more we normalize this type of AI manipulation. The more we normalize sexual violation using technology. At its extreme, this can lead to normalizing creating deepfake pornography of others- especially minors.
Why Parents & Educators Need to Care
💡Privacy risks: These apps require users to upload photos, but where do those images go? Are they being stored? Sold? Used in ways we don’t know about? Nobody really knows where these images end up, and that’s a major red flag. 🚩
💡Deepfakes becoming normalized: The more kids see deepfake videos pop up on their feeds, the more ‘normal’ they start to feel, just another trend, nothing to question. But that’s exactly the problem. We want to uphold a strict definition of consent and boundaries digitally. It’s critical to creating a society that rejects exploitation.
💡Potential for harm: Imagine a teen using this technology to create a fake video of a classmate. Or an adult misusing it in ways we don’t even want to think about. Making it way too easy to manipulate photos without consent like this leaves the door to potentially harming kids wide open.
Talking to Your Kids About AI & Deepfakes
Good news: you don’t need to be a tech guru to help your kids make sense of this stuff. Just start here:
👀Ask them if they’ve seen these apps. Keep it casual: “Have you ever seen those AI kissing apps on TikTok? What do you think about them?” Getting their perspective first makes the conversation more natural.
🤔Teach them to question what they see. Explain how AI can be used to manipulate videos and why that’s a big deal. Encourage them to ask: “Is this real? Who made it? What’s the intention behind it?”
🚫Set boundaries around image sharing. Remind your teens that consent means respecting someone’s body and choice in person and digitally. Deepfakes fall under this definition too. Engage them in empathy by considering how someone might feel to find out their digital body has been made to engage in behaviour they wouldn’t consent to in person.
💬Keep the conversation open. Make sure your kids know they can come to you with no judgment and no fear if they ever see something online that makes them uncomfortable
At first glance, AI kissing apps might seem like just another weird internet trend.
But they’re part of something bigger: the rise of deepfake technology and all the risks that come with it. As parents and educators, our job isn’t to panic, it’s to help kids think critically about the digital world they’re growing up in.
