AI generated child sexual abuse content is increasingly being found on publicly accessible areas of the internet, exposing even more people to the harmful and horrific imagery, says the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).
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 be1.
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 months2.
The IWF, Europe’s largest hotline dedicated to finding and removing child sexual abuse imagery from the internet, is warning that almost all the content (99%)3 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%)4 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 classed as non-photographic imagery, such as cartoons, and is also regarded as harmful to view and accordingly assessed by IWF analysts1.
The IWF traces where child sexual abuse content is hosted so that analysts can act to get it swiftly removed.
More than half of the AI generated content found in the past six months was hosted on servers in two countries, the Russian Federation (36%) and the United States (22%), with Japan and the Netherlands following at 11% and 8% respectively5.
Addresses of webpages containing AI generated child sexual abuse images are uploaded on to the IWF’s URL list which is shared with the tech industry to block the sites and prevent people from being able to access or see them.
The AI images are also hashed – given a special unique code like a digital fingerprint – and tagged as AI on a Hash List of more than two million images which can be used by law enforcement in their investigations.
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