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 deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting a rise in 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.”
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