Oakland County man who made AI porn of social media influencer pleads guilty

FOX 2 - An Oakland County man accused of making AI porn of a social media influencer in an extortion scheme, has pleaded guilty.

The backstory:

Joshua Stilman pleaded guilty to one count of cyberstalking on Tuesday, according to United States Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon. 

From February 2025 through March of that year, Stilman created artificial intelligence-generated nude and sexually graphic images of the victim, using publicly available images of her. 

In private social media messages with Victim-1, Stilman frequently asked the Oregon woman about her sexual preferences and made sexual threats of his own. 

Eventually, Stilman threatened to release the AI-generated images to her nearly 100,000 social media followers if she did not continue to respond to his messages.

Sentencing is scheduled for May 21. Cyberstalking has a maximum term of imprisonment of five years.

"Joshua Stilman's guilty plea makes clear that cyber stalking - especially when amplified through the weaponization of artificial intelligence - is a dangerous offense, not a harmless online act," said Jennifer Runyan, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office. "Hiding behind a keyboard to intimidate and harass another person is an act of cowardice, and today's outcome demonstrates that such behavior will be met with full accountability."

The woman is a content creator from Oregon and does boudoir photography, among other photography sessions.

A year ago, she opened up her DMs and found a naked photo of what looked like herself. But it wasn't her. It was an AI-generated image made to look like her with taunting and aggressive messages from an anonymous follower.

That follower was later determined to be Stilman, police say.

She says she didn't know what his intentions were and kept him at bay by putting a thumbs up on the photos. But that changed in March when he sent an album of AI nude photos with a threat that he would post them online if she didn't respond.

She told FOX 2 that Stilman threatened sexual assault against her if she didn’t write back.

"If you’re going to start making sexual assault threats at me, that’s something I take very seriously, and that’s when I was like absolutely not, I’m going to come after you for that," she said.

And she did. She and her nearly 100,000 followers tracked the man down to Oakland County.

The graphic designer is, as he said, married with children. 

Once she figured out who he was, he blocked her everywhere, but the public shaming didn't stop. The woman was on a mission to stop what happened to her from happening to someone else.

"If I can help mitigate these things from happening in the future, I think that I have to at this point," she said.