The negative impacts of artificial intelligence, which have already led to the proliferation of fake and deepfake videos of celebrities online, are now extending to children. AI-generated child sexual abuse content is increasingly being found on publicly accessible areas of the internet.
According to a report by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), AI-generated child sexual abuse content is exposing even more people to the harmful and horrific imagery.
Many of the images and videos of children being hurt and abused are so realistic that they can be very difficult to tell apart from imagery of real children and are regarded as criminal content in the eyes of UK law, much in the same way as ‘traditional’ child sexual abuse material would be, as per the IWF.
In the past six months alone, analysts at the IWF have seen a 6% increase in confirmed reports containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material, compared with the preceding 12 months.
The IWF is warning that almost all the content (99%) was found on publicly available areas of the internet and was not hidden on the dark web. Most of the reports have come from members of the public (78%) who have stumbled across the criminal imagery on sites such as forums or AI galleries. The remainder were actioned by IWF analysts through proactive searching.
Analysts say that viewing AI-generated content of children being sexually abused can be as distressing as seeing real children in abuse imagery if a person is not prepared or trained to cope with seeing such material.
Some AI child sexual abuse material is classified as non-photographic imagery, such as cartoons, and is also regarded as harmful to view and accordingly assessed by IWF analysts.
