AI-generated content about child sexual abuse is increasingly being found online, says Watchdog

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 images, a security watchdog has said.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said that many of the images and videos of injured and abused children were so realistic that they were difficult to distinguish from images of real children and would be considered criminal content in the eyes of British law, much like that like “traditional” child sexual abuse material.

In the last six months alone, IMF analysts have seen a 6% increase in confirmed reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material compared to the previous twelve months.

The IWF, Europe’s largest hotline for finding and removing depictions of child sexual abuse online, warns that almost all content (99%) was found in publicly accessible areas of the internet and not hidden on the dark web.

Most reports came from members of the public (78%) who came across the criminal images on websites such as forums or AI galleries. The rest were processed by IMF analysts through proactive searches.

Analysts say watching AI-generated content of children being sexually abused can be as distressing as watching real children in abuse images if a person is not prepared or trained to handle viewing such material.

Some AI child sexual abuse materials are classified as non-photographic images, such as: B. Cartoons, and are also considered harmful to viewing and are rated accordingly by IMF analysts.

The IWF tracks where child sexual abuse content is hosted so analysts can take action to quickly remove it.

More than half of the AI-generated content found in the last six months was hosted on servers in two countries, the Russian Federation (36%) and the United States (22%), followed by Japan and the Netherlands at 11% and 11% respectively. 8%. respectively.