AI child sexual abuse images are spreading. Here’s how the DOJ is responding
Justice Department officials say they’re aggressively going after offenders who exploit AI tools to manipulate images of children.
A child psychiatrist who altered a first-day-of-school photo he saw on Facebook to make a group of girls appear nude. A U.S. Army soldier accused of creating images depicting children he knew being sexually abused. A software engineer charged with generating hyper-realistic sexually explicit images of children.
Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. are cracking down on a troubling spread of child sexual abuse imagery created through artificial intelligence technology—from manipulated photos of real children to graphic depictions of computer-generated kids. Justice Department officials say they’re aggressively going after offenders who exploit AI tools, while states are racing to ensure people generating “deepfakes” and other harmful imagery of kids can be prosecuted under their laws.
“We’ve got to signal early and often that it is a crime, that it will be investigated and prosecuted when the evidence supports it,” Steven Grocki, who leads the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “And if you’re sitting there thinking otherwise, you fundamentally are wrong. And it’s only a matter of time before somebody holds you accountable.”
The Justice Department says existing federal laws clearly apply to such content, and recently brought what’s believed to be the first federal case involving purely AI-generated imagery—meaning the children depicted are not real but virtual. In another case, federal authorities in August arrested a U.S. soldier stationed in Alaska accused of running innocent pictures of real children he knew through an AI chatbot to make the images sexually explicit.