'My Only Choice Is Changing the Internet'

AT 24, BREEZE LIU DISCOVERED A MAN USED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO MAKE FAKE PORN OF HER AND THEN THE VIDEO SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE. NOW SHE'S ON A MISSION TO END THE TERRIFYING TREND 

- JOHNNY DODD

When a friend called Breeze Liu one afternoon in April 2020 to say that someone had posted a porn video of her online, she knew it was a fake—”I said, ‘No, this is not happening, you made a mistake.’” But she soon saw the doctored clip, featuring her face, on a widely used adult website, and she fought the urge to vomit. “I was devastated,” she says. “I was so humiliated and felt so alone.” Shaken by what she saw, Liu, then 24, walked up to the roof of her parents’ apartment building and told herself she no longer had any reason to live. “All I could think about,” she recalls, “was that I’d be better off dead.”

Liu didn’t jump that day. Instead she called the police in Berkeley, Calif., with the name of the person who she suspected had created the video—a student she knew before her graduation from the University of California at Berkeley two years earlier. She’d rebuffed his advances, she says, and he wanted “to humiliate me.” But she quickly learned authorities had few tools at their disposal. “Instead of justice,” Liu says,“they told me there was nothing they could do.”