An increase in AI-generated child sex abuse content is pushing US federal prosecutors to crack down harder on suspects.
Fears are rising within law enforcement agencies that suspects are using artificial intelligence to create child sex abuse content and that they may end up flooding the internet with such abusive content.
The US Justice Department has already brought two cases in 2024 of defendants who allegedly used generative AI to manipulate and create illicit images of children and plan to bring in more as they increase the pressure on suspects.
“There’s more to come,” said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, in an interview. “What we’re concerned about is the normalization of this. AI makes it easier to generate these kinds of images, and the more that are out there, the more normalized this becomes. That’s something that we really want to stymie and get in front of.”
The danger of generative AI creating child sex abuse content
With generative AI becoming more and more prevalent in the illegal creation of child sex abuse content, the United States justice system may have to adapt to prosecute the crime accordingly.
However, for the time being, Silver said that prosecutors could pursue the suspects on obscenity charges if the laws against child pornography cannot be applied. An example of a case that prosecutors can pursue using obscenity charges would be one where a specific child cannot be identified in the content.
One of the Justice Department cases brought on the matter of child sex abuse content was against Steven Anderegg, a software engineer from Wisconsin. According to the case documents, Anderegg is being accused of using a text-to-image AI model called Stable Diffusion to create explicit images of children. He is said to have sent them to a 15-year-old boy. Anderegg is currently awaiting trial and has been released until his court date.
The documents say Anderegg pleaded not guilty and attempted to have the charges dropped because he claimed his constitutional rights had been breached.
Stability AI, the creators of Stable Diffusion, claim that Anderegg used a part of the existing AI model before they took over development.
The other case the Justice Department has been pursuing is a United States Army soldier. The soldier, Seth Herrera, pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. According to court documents, Herrera was accused of manipulating photos of children into violent child sex abuse content.
While the law is stringent on child pornography and explicit depictions of actual children, officials have a hard time cracking down on AI-generated child sex abuse content because no laws have been specifically written for this yet.
“I don’t want to paint this as a future problem, because it’s not. It’s happening now,” said Rebecca Portnoff, vice president of data science for Thorn, a non-profit agency working to help crack down on the issue. “As far as whether it’s a future problem that will get completely out of control, I still have hope that we can act in this window of opportunity to prevent that.”
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