U.S. Prosecutors Tackle Rising Threat of AI-Generated Child Sex Abuse Imagery

U.S. prosecutors see rising threat of AI-generated child sex abuse imagery

U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material. The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children. "There's more to come," said James Silver, the deputy chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting a rise in similar cases. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver said in an interview. "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."

AI-generated child sex abuse images pose challenges for federal prosecutors

U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material. The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children. "There's more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver said in an interview. "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."

Prosecutors Crack Down on Illicit AI Imagery Involving Minors

U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material. The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children. "There's more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver said in an interview. "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."

US Prosecutors See Rising Threat of AI-Generated Child Sex Abuse Imagery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material. The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children. "There's more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver said in an interview. "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 rise of generative AI has sparked concerns at the Justice Department that the rapidly advancing technology will be used to carry out cyberattacks, boost the sophistication of cryptocurrency scammers and undermine election security. Child sex abuse cases mark some of the first times that prosecutors are trying to apply existing U.S. laws to alleged crimes involving AI, and even successful convictions could face appeals as courts weigh how the new technology may alter the legal landscape around child exploitation. Prosecutors and child safety advocates say generative AI systems can allow offenders to morph and sexualize ordinary photos of children and warn that a proliferation of AI-produced material will make it harder for law enforcement to identify and locate real victims of abuse. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit group that collects tips about online child exploitation, receives an average of about 450 reports each month related to generative AI, according to Yiota Souras, the group's chief legal officer. That's a fraction of the average of 3 million monthly reports of overall online child exploitation the group received last year. UNTESTED GROUND Cases involving AI-generated sex abuse imagery are likely to tread new legal ground, particularly when an identifiable child is not depicted. Silver said in those instances, prosecutors can charge obscenity offenses when child pornography laws do not apply. Prosecutors indicted Steven Anderegg, a software engineer from Wisconsin, in May on charges including transferring obscene material. Anderegg is accused of using Stable Diffusion, a popular text-to-image AI model, to generate images of young children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and sharing some of those images with a 15-year-old boy, according to court documents. Anderegg has pleaded not guilty and is seeking to dismiss the charges by arguing that they violate his rights under the U.S. Constitution, court documents show. He has been released from custody while awaiting trial. His attorney was not available for comment. Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion, said the case involved a version of the AI model that was released before the company took over the development of Stable Diffusion. The company said it has made investments to prevent "the misuse of AI for the production of harmful content." Federal prosecutors also charged a U.S. Army soldier with child pornography offenses in part for allegedly using AI chatbots to morph innocent photos of children he knew to generate violent sexual abuse imagery, court documents show. The defendant, Seth Herrera, pleaded not guilty and has been ordered held in jail to await trial. Herrera's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Legal experts said that while sexually explicit depictions of actual children are covered under child pornography laws, the landscape around obscenity and purely AI-generated imagery is less clear. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 struck down as unconstitutional a federal law that criminalized any depiction, including computer-generated imagery, appearing to show minors engaged in sexual activity. "These prosecutions will be hard if the government is relying on the moral repulsiveness alone to carry the day," said Jane Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies AI and its impact on privacy and law enforcement. Federal prosecutors have secured convictions in recent years against defendants who possessed sexually explicit images of children that also qualified as obscene under the law. Advocates are also focusing on preventing AI systems from generating abusive material. Two nonprofit advocacy groups, Thorn and All Tech Is Human, secured commitments in April from some of the largest players in AI including Alphabet's Google, Amazon.com, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Stability AI to avoid training their models on child sex abuse imagery and to monitor their platforms to prevent its creation and spread. "I don't want to paint this as a future problem, because it's not. It's happening now," said Rebecca Portnoff, Thorn's director of data science. "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." (Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Bill Berkrot)

US prosecutors see rising threat of AI-generated child sex abuse imagery

U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material. The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children. "There's more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver said in an interview. "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 rise of generative AI has sparked concerns at the Justice Department that the rapidly advancing technology will be used to carry out cyberattacks, boost the sophistication of cryptocurrency scammers and undermine election security. Child sex abuse cases mark some of the first times that prosecutors are trying to apply existing U.S. laws to alleged crimes involving AI, and even successful convictions could face appeals as courts weigh how the new technology may alter the legal landscape around child exploitation. Prosecutors and child safety advocates say generative AI systems can allow offenders to morph and sexualize ordinary photos of children and warn that a proliferation of AI-produced material will make it harder for law enforcement to identify and locate real victims of abuse. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit group that collects tips about online child exploitation, receives an average of about 450 reports each month related to generative AI, according to Yiota Souras, the group's chief legal officer. That's a fraction of the average of 3 million monthly reports of overall online child exploitation the group received last year. Untested ground Cases involving AI-generated sex abuse imagery are likely to tread new legal ground, particularly when an identifiable child is not depicted. Silver said in those instances, prosecutors can charge obscenity offenses when child pornography laws do not apply. Prosecutors indicted Steven Anderegg, a software engineer from Wisconsin, in May on charges including transferring obscene material. Anderegg is accused of using Stable Diffusion, a popular text-to-image AI model, to generate images of young children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and sharing some of those images with a 15-year-old boy, according to court documents. Anderegg has pleaded not guilty and is seeking to dismiss the charges by arguing that they violate his rights under the U.S. Constitution, court documents show. He has been released from custody while awaiting trial. His attorney was not available for comment. Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion, said the case involved a version of the AI model that was released before the company took over the development of Stable Diffusion. The company said it has made investments to prevent "the misuse of AI for the production of harmful content." Federal prosecutors also charged a U.S. Army soldier with child pornography offenses in part for allegedly using AI chatbots to morph innocent photos of children he knew to generate violent sexual abuse imagery, court documents show. The defendant, Seth Herrera, pleaded not guilty and has been ordered held in jail to await trial. Herrera's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Legal experts said that while sexually explicit depictions of actual children are covered under child pornography laws, the landscape around obscenity and purely AI-generated imagery is less clear. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 struck down as unconstitutional a federal law that criminalized any depiction, including computer-generated imagery, appearing to show minors engaged in sexual activity. "These prosecutions will be hard if the government is relying on the moral repulsiveness alone to carry the day," said Jane Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies AI and its impact on privacy and law enforcement. Federal prosecutors have secured convictions in recent years against defendants who possessed sexually explicit images of children that also qualified as obscene under the law. Advocates are also focusing on preventing AI systems from generating abusive material. Two nonprofit advocacy groups, Thorn and All Tech Is Human, secured commitments in April from some of the largest players in AI including Alphabet's Google, Amazon.com, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Stability AI to avoid training their models on child sex abuse imagery and to monitor their platforms to prevent its creation and spread. "I don't want to paint this as a future problem, because it's not. It's happening now," said Rebecca Portnoff, Thorn's director of data science. "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."

US prosecutors see rising threat of AI-generated child sex abuse imagery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material. The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children. "There's more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver said in an interview. "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 rise of generative AI has sparked concerns at the Justice Department that the rapidly advancing technology will be used to carry out cyberattacks, boost the sophistication of cryptocurrency scammers and undermine election security. Child sex abuse cases mark some of the first times that prosecutors are trying to apply existing U.S. laws to alleged crimes involving AI, and even successful convictions could face appeals as courts weigh how the new technology may alter the legal landscape around child exploitation. Prosecutors and child safety advocates say generative AI systems can allow offenders to morph and sexualize ordinary photos of children and warn that a proliferation of AI-produced material will make it harder for law enforcement to identify and locate real victims of abuse. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit group that collects tips about online child exploitation, receives an average of about 450 reports each month related to generative AI, according to Yiota Souras, the group's chief legal officer. That's a fraction of the average of 3 million monthly reports of overall online child exploitation the group received last year. UNTESTED GROUND Cases involving AI-generated sex abuse imagery are likely to tread new legal ground, particularly when an identifiable child is not depicted. Silver said in those instances, prosecutors can charge obscenity offenses when child pornography laws do not apply. Prosecutors indicted Steven Anderegg, a software engineer from Wisconsin, in May on charges including transferring obscene material. Anderegg is accused of using Stable Diffusion, a popular text-to-image AI model, to generate images of young children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and sharing some of those images with a 15-year-old boy, according to court documents. Anderegg has pleaded not guilty and is seeking to dismiss the charges by arguing that they violate his rights under the U.S. Constitution, court documents show. He has been released from custody while awaiting trial. His attorney was not available for comment. Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion, said the case involved a version of the AI model that was released before the company took over the development of Stable Diffusion. The company said it has made investments to prevent "the misuse of AI for the production of harmful content." Federal prosecutors also charged a U.S. Army soldier with child pornography offenses in part for allegedly using AI chatbots to morph innocent photos of children he knew to generate violent sexual abuse imagery, court documents show. The defendant, Seth Herrera, pleaded not guilty and has been ordered held in jail to await trial. Herrera's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Legal experts said that while sexually explicit depictions of actual children are covered under child pornography laws, the landscape around obscenity and purely AI-generated imagery is less clear. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 struck down as unconstitutional a federal law that criminalized any depiction, including computer-generated imagery, appearing to show minors engaged in sexual activity. "These prosecutions will be hard if the government is relying on the moral repulsiveness alone to carry the day," said Jane Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies AI and its impact on privacy and law enforcement. Federal prosecutors have secured convictions in recent years against defendants who possessed sexually explicit images of children that also qualified as obscene under the law. Advocates are also focusing on preventing AI systems from generating abusive material. Two nonprofit advocacy groups, Thorn and All Tech Is Human, secured commitments in April from some of the largest players in AI including Alphabet's Google, Amazon.com, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Stability AI to avoid training their models on child sex abuse imagery and to monitor their platforms to prevent its creation and spread. "I don't want to paint this as a future problem, because it's not. It's happening now," said Rebecca Portnoff, Thorn's director of data science. "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." (Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Bill Berkrot)

US prosecutors see rising threat of AI-generated child sex abuse imagery

WASHINGTON, Oct 17 (Reuters) - U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material. The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children. Advertisement · Scroll to continue "There's more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases. "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver said in an interview. "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." Advertisement · Scroll to continue The rise of generative AI has sparked concerns at the Justice Department that the rapidly advancing technology will be used to carry out cyberattacks, boost the sophistication of cryptocurrency scammers and undermine election security. Child sex abuse cases mark some of the first times that prosecutors are trying to apply existing U.S. laws to alleged crimes involving AI, and even successful convictions could face appeals as courts weigh how the new technology may alter the legal landscape around child exploitation. Prosecutors and child safety advocates say generative AI systems can allow offenders to morph and sexualize ordinary photos of children and warn that a proliferation of AI-produced material will make it harder for law enforcement to identify and locate real victims of abuse. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit group that collects tips about online child exploitation, receives an average of about 450 reports each month related to generative AI, according to Yiota Souras, the group's chief legal officer. That's a fraction of the average of 3 million monthly reports of overall online child exploitation the group received last year. UNTESTED GROUND Cases involving AI-generated sex abuse imagery are likely to tread new legal ground, particularly when an identifiable child is not depicted. Silver said in those instances, prosecutors can charge obscenity offenses when child pornography laws do not apply. Prosecutors indicted Steven Anderegg, a software engineer from Wisconsin, in May on charges including transferring obscene material. Anderegg is accused of using Stable Diffusion, a popular text-to-image AI model, to generate images of young children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and sharing some of those images with a 15-year-old boy, according to court documents. Anderegg has pleaded not guilty and is seeking to dismiss the charges by arguing that they violate his rights under the U.S. Constitution, court documents show. He has been released from custody while awaiting trial. His attorney was not available for comment. Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion, said the case involved a version of the AI model that was released before the company took over the development of Stable Diffusion. The company said it has made investments to prevent "the misuse of AI for the production of harmful content." Federal prosecutors also charged a U.S. Army soldier with child pornography offenses in part for allegedly using AI chatbots to morph innocent photos of children he knew to generate violent sexual abuse imagery, court documents show. The defendant, Seth Herrera, pleaded not guilty and has been ordered held in jail to await trial. Herrera's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Legal experts said that while sexually explicit depictions of actual children are covered under child pornography laws, the landscape around obscenity and purely AI-generated imagery is less clear. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 struck down as unconstitutional a federal law that criminalized any depiction, including computer-generated imagery, appearing to show minors engaged in sexual activity. "These prosecutions will be hard if the government is relying on the moral repulsiveness alone to carry the day," said Jane Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies AI and its impact on privacy and law enforcement. Federal prosecutors have secured convictions in recent years against defendants who possessed sexually explicit images of children that also qualified as obscene under the law. Advocates are also focusing on preventing AI systems from generating abusive material. Two nonprofit advocacy groups, Thorn and All Tech Is Human, secured commitments in April from some of the largest players in AI including Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, OpenAI and Stability AI to avoid training their models on child sex abuse imagery and to monitor their platforms to prevent its creation and spread. "I don't want to paint this as a future problem, because it's not. It's happening now," said Rebecca Portnoff, Thorn's director of data science. "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." Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Bill Berkrot Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

US prosecutors vow to step up fight against fake AI child sex images

Kids defenseless against AI-generated sex images as feds expand crackdown. Cops aren't sure how to protect kids from an ever-escalating rise in fake child sex abuse imagery fueled by advances in generative AI. Last year, child safety experts warned of thousands of "AI-generated child sex images" rapidly spreading on the dark web around the same time the FBI issued a warning that "benign photos" of children posted online could be easily manipulated to exploit and harm kids. So far, US prosecutors have only brought two criminal cases in 2024 attempting to use existing child pornography and obscenity laws to combat the threat, Reuters reported on Thursday. Meanwhile, as young girls are increasingly targeted by classmates in middle and high schools, at least one teen has called for a targeted federal law designed to end the AI abuse. While it's hard to understand the full extent of the threat because kids often underreport sex abuse, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) told Reuters that it receives about 450 reports of AI child sex abuse each month. That's a tiny fraction of the 3 million monthly reports of child sex abuse occurring in the real world, but cops warned in January that this sudden flood of AI child sex abuse images was making it harder to investigate those real child abuse cases NCMEC tracks. And the chief of the US Department of Justice's computer crime and intellectual property section, James Silver, told Reuters that as more people realize the abusive potential of AI tools, "there's more to come." "What we're concerned about is the normalization of this," Silver told Reuters. "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." One of the most popular and seemingly accessible ways that bad actors are perpetrating this harm is by using so-called "nudify" apps that remove clothing from ordinary photos kids otherwise feel safe sharing online. According to Wired, millions of people are using nudify bots on Telegram, including to generate harmful images of children. (That's the same chat app that swore it's not an "anarchic paradise" after its CEO was arrested for alleged crimes, including complicity in distributing child pornography.)