on how thousands of AI-generated child sex images are being created and shared across the web.
Actor Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Thorn, testifies in 2017 at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on ending child sex abuse. Portnoff added that the images are a mix of illegal content that depicts the likeness of an actual child and AI that is generated without “trying to borrow the likeness of a [specific] child.”Emerging AI tools allow anyone to create realistic images simply by typing in a short description of what they want to see. The different diffusion models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, were given billions of images and can mimic those visual patterns to create their own images.
There’s also debate on whether the images violate federal child protection laws because they depict children who don’t actually exist. According to the Post, Justice Department officials who investigate child exploitation have said those images are still illegal even if they’re AI-generated, but said they couldn’t cite a case where someone has been charged over those types of images.
Bilal Lakhani, the vice president of marketing and communications at Thorn, said it can be difficult to combat an issue that no one wants to talk about and isn’t always apparent.