Abusing Athletes

During the 2026 Winter Olympics, users on the anonymous message board 4chan produced and shared AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) of multiple female Olympic athletes, including U.S. Olympians Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn, Isabeau Levito, and Mikaela Shiffrin, as well as Eileen Gu, who competed for China.

For this report, we examined the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that 4chan users utilized to create their images. We found that they leveraged low-rank adaptation (LoRA) methods – downloadable files that can train unmoderated, locally run AI models – to generate NCII of the five athletes.

These images perpetuate a form of online harassment that we have previously found was used to produce AI-generated NCII of celebrity and non-celebrity women, including Taylor Swift. The techniques used also reflect how online communities engaged in the creation of AI-generated NCII continue to adapt to the spread of easily accessible AI tools and tighter restrictions on mainstream AI models that limit their use for creating NCII.

While Graphika conducted a separate, independent investigation, the open-source social media intelligence company Open Measures similarly found that 4chan users had generated and “traded” synthetic NCII of female Olympic athletes.