AI increases the risk of child sexual abuse in real life

Artificial intelligence is becoming a major contributor to a growing trend that creates realistic images of children in sexual contexts, which researchers say could lead to an increase in sex crimes against children in the real world.

AI services that can mimic human dialogue and create realistic images are gaining popularity, thanks largely to the launch of a chatbot. ChatGPT. AI capable of assisting in work or study tasks is attracting the attention of people around the world. However, some use AI platforms for malicious purposes.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) of the United Kingdom has warned about the distribution of generated images of children in sexual content (Child Sex Abuse Material, CSAM). This trend normalizes pedophilia and unacceptable behavior towards children.

The agency estimates that around 830,000 adults, or 1.6% of the UK adult population, pose a sexual threat to children. This number is 10 times higher than the total population serving sentences in the country’s prisons.

The agency’s NCA experts concluded that viewing such images – whether they are real or created with the help of AI – significantly increases the risk of child sexual abuse in real life. In addition, the generated images can be used in sexual blackmail .

Malicious AI-generated content can also re-harm real victims whose images from the past have been used to train AI models to create fake images.

The US has also seen an explosion in the use of AI to create sexual images of children. All this creates additional difficulties for law enforcement agencies in identifying victims and combating crimes.

That being said, despite there being clear guidelines on popular AI platforms aimed at preventing the creation of inappropriate images, workarounds for creating sexual images are being discussed on dark web forums.

Previously, child protection experts said they could not resist the thousands of “AI images of child sexual abuse” that are easily and quickly created and spread on dark forums pedophiles

In addition, Meta* this year made open source its large language model (LLM) under the name LLaMA. This is a powerful artificial intelligence that can generate texts on various topics. However, some users are already making full use of this technology to create their own text and image chatbots for virtual sex.

* The Meta company and its products (Instagram and Facebook) are recognized as extremist, their activities are prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation.