AI Is Being Used to Exploit Our Children

The internet is a wonderful place, but for children, it is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Pedophiles, grifters, scammers, hackers, and crooks are working hard to exploit artificial intelligence (AI) to target victims in innovative and dangerous ways, Alex Murray, a senior UK police chief has warned.

In a sickening new trend, sexual predators are using AI to denude children in family photos taken from social media.

The AI-powered apps digitally alter the images to make children appear naked using deep-learning algorithms.

According to Murray, deepfake and AI-generated child abuse images online are doubling every six months.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) preserves every child’s right to protection from manipulation and abuse. This means they have a right to dignity and self-expression, but generative AI threatens to erode both by allowing bad actors to produce harmful content that floods law enforcement with fake CSAM cases, hinders victim identification, and fuels harassment, blackmail, and scams, according to The Jurist.

According to Progressive Britain, a website dedicated to the revitalization of the UK center-left, “Earlier this year, the Online Safety Act made sharing nude deepfake images of adults without consent illegal. It is already illegal to create, share, and be in possession of a nude deepfake image of a child – but the tools and apps that generate these images remain legal, cheap, and easy to use and continue to cause harm.”

Shockingly, estimates suggest that over half a million children have been exposed to some experience with AI-generated, sexually explicit images.

A poll conducted by online safety non-profit, Internet Matters, found most teenagers feel that having a nude deepfake image created and shared of them would be worse than a real image being shared.

In Canada, the RCMP's National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre (NCECC) has also said it is seeing an increase in online efforts to exploit children through AI deepfake technology.

This disturbing phenomenon of using AI to clone video or audio is not new. The FBI recently warned that scammers are utilizing the technology through realistic scams to try and steal money from businesses.

The question is what to do about this and the overall problem involving AI and bad people who want to use fast-advancing technology to take advantage of vulnerable people.

A research paper published in 2020 by the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), suggested governments take several approaches to fighting criminals utilizing AI for nefarious purposes.

One recommendation is to “harness the potential of AI technology as a crime-fighting tool to future-proof the cybersecurity industry and policing, building on ongoing efforts to ensure that AI is trustworthy…”

Another recommendation is to promote “responsible AI innovation and the exchange of best practices in public forums such as the AI for Good Global Summit,112 the Europol-European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) IoT and AI Security Conference,113 the Europol-INTERPOL Cybercrime Conference,114 and the UNICRI-INTERPOL Global Meeting on AI for Law Enforcement.”

This is a good start, but it is never a good idea to leave our children in the hands of the government or bureaucratically bloated agencies.

At the end of the day, it comes down to something way more simple: Parents need to remain aware of what their children are doing on their phones and prevent them from being taken advantage of by creeps.

One thing you should do is the one thing many experts agree on: Talk to your children about being careful on the internet and not falling victim to dangerous pedophiles and scammers.