Law Enforcement and Advocacy Groups Sounding the Alarm on AI Generated Child Pornography

Friday, May 24th, 2024 -- 12:01 PM

(Evan Casey, Wisconsin Public Radio) As artificial intelligence continues to shape and evolve how people live, law enforcement and advocacy groups are sounding the alarm about the use of AI to produce and distribute child pornography.

According to Evan Casey with Wisconsin Public Radio, last week, a 42-year-old Wisconsin man was arrested for allegedly producing and distributing “AI-generated images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct,” according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The case comes as similar incidents are popping up across the nation, as people are using text-to-image AI models to create lewd pictures of children. Experts are now worried the issue will become worse as the technology advances and its use becomes more widespread.

“It’s clear that it’s a growing problem that’s impacting communities around the country,” Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said. “Given the developments that we’re seeing in AI, we expect that this problem is going to continue to grow.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it received 4,700 reports of AI-generated child porn images, also known as child sexual abuse images or material, last year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning in March that producing child sexual abuse material using AI is illegal.

Meanwhile, a Stanford Internet Observatory investigation identified hundreds of known images of child sexual abuse material in a dataset used to train popular AI text-to-image generation models. Lisa Thompson, the vice president and director of the research institute at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said the issue has become a “crisis.”

“Now imagine that you’re a survivor of child sexual abuse exploitation,” Thompson said. “Has your abuse been used to train AI … that would be so haunting to even think about, to contemplate.” 

In March, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed a law that created a new crime of possession of “virtual child pornography,” making it a Class D felony to “knowingly receive, distribute, produce, possess, or access in any way, with intent to view, obscene material that contains a depiction of a purported child engaging in sexually explicit conduct and the person knew, or reasonably should have known, that the material contains such a depiction.”

In Wisconsin, a Class D felony is punishable by up to 25 years in prison, a maximum fine of $100,000, or both. Thompson called that law an “exciting development.” Kaul also said he believes that law is sufficient, but he wants to see more action from lawmakers.

“We also need to see more action on the federal level, including more information gathering by Congress,” Kaul said. Kaul signed a letter with all 50 attorneys general urging Congress to establish a commission to “study the means and methods of AI that can be used to exploit children specifically and to propose solutions to deter and address such exploitation.”

The letter said AI can be used to create “deep fakes” by using real photographs of children and then generating new images of those children in sexual positions. AI can also be used to combine data from photographs of children to animate realistic sexual images.

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