420 UK Children Report Explicit Deepfakes in First Half of 2026, Exceeding All of Last Year

Deepfake victim calls for better regulation of 'dangerous' AI

A woman whose modelling photographs were used to create sexually explicit images without her consent is calling for better regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), saying: "It's dangerous." Georgia Horton said she was horrified after discovering pictures taken from her social media accounts had been manipulated using AI to create pornographic images. And the person responsible was someone she knew - old college friend Ethan Orchard. Orchard, from Southsea, was jailed for three years and four months in July after creating and sharing fake explicit images of Georgia and two other women. Orchard had also posted violent and sexually explicit fantasies about the women online and asked other men to share theirs. "He would make people choose between us, or ask what they wanted to do to us," said Georgia. "One of the posts was, 'What would you do if you had five minutes alone with her?' And it got so much worse from there. "The worst one I saw was, 'Would you save her? Would you rape her? Or would you sell her?'." Georgia and Orchard had attended college together in Hampshire and she had believed they were friends, she told the BBC. She said she was speaking publicly about her experience now in the hope of raising awareness of what she describes as the "darker side" of artificial intelligence. "Everyone seems to be so pro-AI, thinking it's just a bit of fun on a computer screen," she said, adding: "But it's dangerous." Earlier this year, new legislation was introduced, making it a criminal offence to create sexually explicit deepfake images of a person without their consent. The law builds on existing offences covering the sharing of non-consensual intimate images of adults. Georgia said while "it's a start", the legislation does not go far enough. She said: "When I heard the law had been introduced, I was so relieved. My case was still going through the courts and we were all pleased to see that progress. "But it's now come to a standstill. "The technology to make these images and videos is still out there and still widely available. "There needs to be more regulation and much tougher safety features built into the programmes themselves. "The big tech companies say they're tightening safeguards but you can still get around them with just a few changes to the prompts. "Self-regulation isn't working. It's also becoming much easier for people to create their own AI models and those are completely unregulated." The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said it was taking the issue seriously. A government spokesperson said: "The creation and sharing of non-consensual sexual deepfakes is utterly vile and we will not allow abusive images to spread online." They added: "The law also makes clear [that] it is illegal to create, possess or share child sexual abuse material, including AI-generated content, and platforms must proactively identify and remove it. "We're holding tech companies to account, from forcing platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of a report, to holding company bosses personally liable when they fail to comply with Ofcom's decisions on intimate image abuse." During the police investigation into Georgia's case, officers uncovered what they described as a "truly horrifying" website containing more than one million child sexual abuse images. Georgia urged parents to be more vigilant about sharing photographs of their children online. "Photos of children being posted online should be banned," she said. "There are so many predators out there and you really don't know who is seeing those pictures. "It only takes one photo to be put through AI and limitless images can be created. The damage that can be done is enormous."

Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves

Exclusive: anonymous flagging service says cases have surged, as watchdog says AI is making sexualised or 'nudified' content easier to produce Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce. The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or "faked" in some way, including with AI and nudification tools. In the first six months of this year it received 420 reports from children of images of themselves that they believed had been faked or manipulated to appear explicit. The number has already exceeded its 2025 total of 397. Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which operates Report Remove alongside the NSPCC children's charity, said the figures underscored the difficulty of preventing online images from being manipulated in an age of widely available and capable AI tools. "If someone can take a benign image of a child from the internet and create child sexual abuse material with it, there is nothing that child can do to stop it from happening apart from preventing anyone from taking pictures of them - or not putting pictures of themselves online," he said. Report Remove has received so many reports of manipulated images from under-18s in recent years that it has added a check box to its online submission form allowing them to flag the material as deepfaked. Sexton said the figures confirmed a fear that AI would improve in capability and be used to manipulate images of real people. "This is one of the harms we were worried about when we first saw AI image generators being used, that they would be used to create child sexual abuse material featuring real children," he said. "Everyone in the world is at risk," Sexton added. The IWF, which monitors the distribution of child sexual abuse material [CSAM] online, said the majority of the reports of manipulated images made to Report Remove in 2025 and 2026 were so severe that they passed the CSAM threshold. AI-generated CSAM is illegal in the UK and the government has made it illegal to adapt an AI model to create abuse material or to distribute such models to others. Rani Govender, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, said tech companies must put stronger safety protections in their AI products to prevent the creation of explicit material. "This rise in children reaching out because fake or AI‑generated sexual images have been created of them is alarming but also sadly predictable," she said. "Tech companies cannot keep pushing out AI products without embedding strong protections that prevent this material from being created in the first place." Sexton said some victims who had contacted Report Remove about manipulated images had been targeted for sextortion, where a blackmailer threatens to publish the material unless they receive financial payment or demands more explicit images from the victim. Report Remove is a service that allows children to anonymously flag intimate images or videos of themselves that have been sent to former partners, sextortion fraudsters or could appear online. The service turns those images into a "hash", or digital fingerprint, which is shared with major tech platforms, which can take the image down or prevent it from being uploaded. The rise of AI-enabled deepfakes has prompted a series of warnings about posting identifiable pictures of children online. Last month the National Crime Agency and IWF encouraged parents and guardians to keep pictures of their children away from public display online. They suggested making social media accounts private or sharing pictures of children through a "close friends" group only. The guidance also followed cases in which cybercriminals had attempted to blackmail schools by scraping pictures of children, using AI to convert them into child sexual abuse material, then threatening to publish the imagery. Schools have been urged to remove identifiable pictures of pupils' faces from their websites and social media accounts.

420 UK children reported explicit deepfakes of themselves in six months. The problem is getting worse

Reports of AI-generated sexual deepfakes involving UK children are increasing Children in the UK are reporting a sharp rise in explicit AI-generated images depicting themselves, according to figures from Report Remove, an online service that allows young people to anonymously report intimate images shared without consent. The service received 420 reports in the first six months of 2026 from children who believed images of themselves had been manipulated or fabricated. That is already higher than the 397 reports recorded during the whole of 2025, according to The Guardian. Recommended Videos The figures highlight a growing problem with generative AI: creating convincing fake images of a real person increasingly requires little technical skill, while stopping those images from spreading can be considerably harder. AI is making fake images easier to create Report Remove, operated by the Internet Watch Foundation alongside the NSPCC, has seen enough manipulated imagery involving under-18s that it added a specific option for children to flag AI-generated material. The service said the majority of manipulated-image reports it received in 2025 and 2026 were serious enough to cross its threshold for child sexual abuse material. Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation, said the figures demonstrated how difficult it is to prevent ordinary photographs from being manipulated once they are available online. That is particularly concerning because the original photograph does not need to be explicit. A harmless image taken from a public social media account can potentially be altered and turned into something abusive. The problem also extends beyond embarrassment or reputational damage. According to the report, some victims have been targeted for sextortion, with perpetrators demanding money or threatening to distribute manipulated images more widely. There have also been cases involving attempts to target schools by collecting photographs of pupils and using AI to manipulate them. Parents and platforms are being forced to rethink safety Online safety experts say technology companies need stronger safeguards around AI image-generation tools. Rani Zachariah, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, said the increase in children reporting fake or AI-generated sexual imagery was alarming but predictable, arguing that stronger protections need to be built into AI products. The National Crime Agency and Internet Watch Foundation have also urged parents and guardians to be cautious about posting identifiable pictures of children publicly. The advice is not necessarily to remove every photograph from the internet, but to reduce how easily strangers can access and reuse identifiable images. For children already affected, Report Remove provides a way to flag images anonymously and seek help getting them removed. The larger problem, however, is moving faster than the safeguards. AI tools can generate increasingly convincing imagery in seconds, while removing copies from websites and social platforms is a slower process. As Sexton warned, everyone is potentially at risk.