WASHINGTON : 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
