Law enforcement is bracing for the flood of AI-generated child sexual abuse images

Law enforcement officials are bracing for an explosion of material generated by artificial intelligence that realistically depicts children being sexually exploited, increasing the challenge of identifying victims and combating such abuse.

The concerns come as Meta, a key tool for authorities in flagging sexually explicit content, has made it harder to track criminals by encrypting the messaging service. The complication underlines the tricky balance tech companies must strike when balancing privacy rights and children's safety. And the prospect of prosecuting these types of crimes raises thorny questions about whether such images are illegal and what recourse exists for victims.

Lawmakers in Congress have seized on some of these concerns to push for stronger safeguards, including calling on technology executives Wednesday to testify about their protection of children. Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift, likely generated by AI, that flooded social media last week only highlighted the risks of such technology.

“Creating sexually explicit images of children through the use of artificial intelligence is a particularly heinous form of online exploitation,” said Steve Grocki, chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Division.

The convenience of AI technology means that with the click of a button, perpetrators can create dozens of images of children being sexually exploited or abused.

Simply entering a prompt displays realistic images, videos, and text within minutes, delivering both new images of real children and explicit images of children that don't really exist. This could include AI-generated material of babies and toddlers being raped; According to a recent publication, famous young children are being sexually abused study from Great Britain; and routine classroom photos, edited so that all the children are naked.

“The horror before us now is that someone can take an image of a child from social media, from a high school page or from a sporting event, and engage in what some call 'nudification',” said Dr. Michael Bourke . , the former chief psychologist for the US Marshals Service who has spent decades working on sex crimes involving children. Using AI to alter photos in this way is becoming more common, he said.

The images are indistinguishable from real ones, experts say, making it harder to distinguish a real victim from a fake one. “The investigations are much more challenging,” said Lt. Robin Richards, commander of the Los Angeles Police Department's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. “It takes time to research this, and once we get deep into the research, it's AI, and what are we going to do with this in the future?”

Understaffed and underfunded, law enforcement agencies are already struggling to keep pace as rapid advances in technology have allowed child sexual abuse images to flourish at a surprising pace. Images and videos, powered by smartphone cameras, the dark web, social media and messaging applications, are ricocheting across the internet.

Only a fraction of the material known to be criminal is investigated. John Pizzuro, the head of Raven, a nonprofit that works with lawmakers and companies to combat child sexual exploitation, said law enforcement officials have linked nearly 100,000 IP addresses nationwide to child sexual abuse over the past 90 days . material. (An IP address is a unique set of numbers assigned to each computer or smartphone connected to the Internet.) Of those, fewer than 700 were investigated, he said, because of a chronic lack of funding to combat these crimes.

Although a 2008 federal law authorized $60 million to help state and local law enforcement investigate and prosecute such crimes, Congress has never appropriated that much in any given year, said Mr. Pizzuro, a former commander who oversaw held cases of online child exploitation in New York. Jersey.

The use of artificial intelligence has complicated other aspects of detecting child sexual abuse. Typically, known material is randomly assigned a series of numbers that amount to a digital fingerprint, which is used to detect and remove illegal content. If the familiar images and videos are modified, the material appears new and is no longer associated with the digital fingerprint.

Compounding these challenges is the fact that while the law requires tech companies to report illegal material if it is discovered, it does not require them to actively seek it out.

The approach of tech companies can vary. Meta is the authorities' best partner when it comes to identifying sexually explicit material involving children.

In 2022, for a total of 32 million tips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the federally designated clearinghouse for child sexual abuse material, Meta referred approximately 21 million people.

But the company encrypts its messaging platform to compete with other secure services that protect users' content, turning the lights off for researchers.

Jennifer Dunton, Raven's legal counsel, warned of the consequences, saying the decision could drastically limit the number of crimes authorities can detect. “Now you have footage that no one has ever seen, and now we're not even looking for it,” she said.

Tom Tugendhat, Britain's security minister, said the move will empower child predators around the world.

“Meta's decision to implement end-to-end encryption without robust security features makes these images available to millions of people without fear of getting caught,” Mr. Tugendhat said in a statement.

The social media giant said it would continue to provide tips about child sexual abuse material to authorities. “We are focused on finding and reporting this content as we work to prevent abuse in the first place,” said Alex Dziedzan, a spokesperson for Meta.

Although there are currently only a small number of cases involving AI-generated child abuse material, this number is expected to grow exponentially and highlight new and complex questions about whether existing federal and state laws are adequate to prosecute these crimes.

First, there is the question of how to treat fully AI-generated materials.

In 2002, the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban on computer-generated images of child sexual abuse, ruling that the law was written so broadly that it could potentially restrict political and artistic works as well. Alan Wilson, South Carolina's attorney general led a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to act quickly, said in an interview that he expected the ruling to be tested as cases of AI-generated child sex abuse material continue to spread.

Several federal laws, including an obscenity statute, can be used to prosecute cases involving online child sex abuse material. Some states are looking at how to criminalize such AI-generated content, including how to account for minors who produce such images and videos.

For Francesca Mani, a high school student in Westfield, NJ, the lack of legal consequences for creating and sharing such AI-generated images is particularly acute.

In October, Francesca, then 14 years old, discovered that she was among the girls in her class whose likeness had been manipulated and stripped of her clothes in what amounted to a nude image of her that she had not consented to, which was then circulated in online group chats.

Francesca has gone from angry to angry to assertive, her mother, Dorota Mani, said in a recent interview, adding that they were working with state and federal lawmakers to draft new laws that would make such fake nudes illegal. The incident remains under investigation, although at least one male student was briefly suspended.

This month Francesca spoke in Washington about her experiences and called on Congress to pass a bill that would make sharing such material a federal crime.

“What happened to me at 14 could happen to anyone,” she said. “That's why it's so important to have laws.”