“Summoning a wizard who can nudify her,” wrote an anonymous 4chan user last week, posting on the site’s /r/ board, a hub for “adult requests” of specific explicit imagery.

Attached to the post was an image of a blonde woman in glasses, an open black jacket, white tank top, and ripped jeans, posing on a low wall with a sweeping view of an old-world city and a river behind her. It’s the kind of picture you’d see on a friend’s Instagram account during their vacation in Europe. On the left edge of the image, you can see that someone else has been cropped out of the photo.

The 4chan anon explained what they wanted from a “wizard,” a site term for anyone skilled at manipulating pictures of women to render deepfakes in which they appear to be undressed, committing sexual acts, or fulfilling a given fetish: “big juggs and thick body,” the user specified. “Bonus praise if you can leave her jacket on.” A few hours later, someone else replied with the altered image, which depicted the same woman, in the same pose and locale, but without a shirt, breasts exposed. (Yes, she still had the jacket on.)

“Thank you so much wiz,” replied an anon—presumably the same person who had made the original request. “Great edit <3.”

Anyone whose likeness is public may be subjected to this same invasive exploitation, but the overwhelming majority of victims of these nudifying acts are women. And new research confirms that such synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) can be created in a collaborative process that strengthens the bonds of an online male community built on shared misogyny.

On Thursday, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a political advocacy group that seeks to counter extremism, hate speech, and misinformation, published a paper on this topic by Leonie Oehmig, a researcher and policy associate in Berlin. Oehmig has studied deepfake intimate image abuse in depth; here she turned her attention to the sordid world of 4chan’s photo-editing “wizards” and their sycophantic followers.

Oehmig found that 4chan threads like the one described above function as an origin point for the dissemination of NCII across more private platforms, including Telegram and Discord. More curiously, though, they tend to follow a familiar script and hierarchical social norms.

Men hoping to humiliate and dehumanize women supply the photographic material and command prompts. WIRED reviewed posts from anonymous 4chan users demanding everything from “black bikini” to “pregnant” to “her hands tied in BDSM style.” Oehmig’s paper describes requests “that subjects be depicted in explicitly humiliating scenarios, incorporating elements such as spit or smeared make-up or placing targets in degrading and symbolic contexts such as being crucified or displayed in a circus.”

A so-called wizard who fulfills one of these fantasies is then lavished with praise. “Holy hell, you truly work miracles,” reads a recent reply from someone pleased with a wizard’s work.

“It was so glorifying,” Oehmig tells WIRED. “It's like, ‘Do your magic, work your magic.’ These people who were creating this abusive material are referred to as ‘sir’ or ‘master.’ I guess that's one of the reasons why the creators actually do it.” (The title of “wizard” also has a notable connection to incel culture, where it refers to a man who is still a virgin past the age of 30.)

Oehmig’s analysis covered thousands of posts from early December 2025 through early March of 2026, with this pattern repeating itself over and over, revealing a power structure where men without the means to digitally strip women naked worship the men who can make their clothes disappear. In some ways, Oehmig observes, this dominance dynamic reflects the “urge for power and control” that drives sexual abuse in the first place.

Which doesn’t mean the non-wizards are completely submissive. Some of their requests are framed as serious tests of ability. "This is a challenge for wizards,” read another post that Oehmig reviewed. “My test subject has no idea what she's in for. Using whatever methods you'd like, give her the makeover she'd never expect. Hoping to get some transformation videos/pics. This was a ton of fun the last time I posted something like this.”

Oehmig says this behavior is not as “fringe” as people may think, nor is it usually “someone random on the internet doing this stuff.” She cites the recent outcry in Germany when actor and TV personality Collien Fernandes, who for years had been plagued by pornographic deepfake imagery of herself circulating online, publicly accused her ex-husband, the actor Christian Ulmen, of spreading this material himself. (Ulmen’s attorneys, who have denied the allegations on his behalf, did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.)

Likewise, the solicitation of NCII on 4chan is frequently tied to personal relationships. “I found a lot of very specific requests for notification that were actually about family members, friends, colleagues, bosses, you name it,” Oehmig says. “It's very often people very close to the victims themselves, without them probably even knowing about it.” A wizard may also be directed to a woman’s Instagram or Facebook account, sources for additional photos to aid their construction of convincing deepfakes.

If a request doesn’t outline how that individual plans to use their proposed deepfake, it’s difficult to predict what they’ll do with it. Some claim they’re asking for an image for their own entertainment or sexual gratification—which, as Oehmig points out, still amounts to a violative assertion of authority over the victim. But others are more open about how they aim to coerce or harm their target. “This woman is ruining my friend’s life and ‘leaking’ a fake nudify into her group chat would be really really funny while she’s at the peak of her instability,” reads a post quoted in Oehmig’s report. “Will provide updates to the fallout.”

Oehmig says that although the anonymizing aspect of 4chan complicates efforts to capture the scale of this coordinated abuse, ISD will release more research in the near future that captured more than 100,000 posts related to nudification across 4chan and several other platforms in a three-month period. “The ecosystem is, I would say, very, very large,” she says.

Those posts included not only requests but links to nudification apps, an area Oehmig is interested in exploring as she looks at the ways that deepfake sexual abuse is being monetized. While her report does not describe anyone charging fees for sexualized deepfakes on 4chan itself, it documents how “wizards” regularly direct users to contact them on less visible platforms, which are no doubt more suitable for arranging financial transactions.

Digital violence that’s typically seen as somewhat confined, then, is more common, more systematic, and more normalized than you might assume. The state of nonconsensual intimate imagery on the internet today speaks to both a cultural rot and a failure to hold platforms and predators accountable for these crimes. If it turns into big business as well, the problem could easily become further entrenched.