The FBI recently warned the public about the rise of AI-generated child sexual abuse materials.
With children spending an increasing amount of time on the internet and many uploading photos to their social media accounts, sexual predators continue to steal these images to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Further compounding the proliferation of CSAM is the easy access to artificial intelligence (AI), and law enforcement agencies and child protective organizations are seeing a dramatic rise in AI-generated CSAM.
Yaron Litwin is a digital safety expert and chief marketing officer at Netspark, the company behind a program called CaseScan that identifies AI-generated CSAM online, aiding law enforcement agencies in their investigations.
Mr. Litwin told The Epoch Times he recommends that parents and teens not post photos on any public forum and that parents talk to their children about the potential dangers of revealing personal information online.
“One of our recommendations is to be a little more cautious with images that are being posted online and really try to keep those within closed networks, where there are only people that you know,” Mr. Litwin said.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry said in 2020 that on average, children ages 8 to 12 spend four to six hours a day watching or using screens, and teens spend up to 9 hours a day on their devices.
Parents Together, a nongovernmental organization that provides news about issues affecting families, released a report in 2023 (pdf) stating that “despite the bad and worsening risks of online sexual exploitation, 97% of children use social media and the internet every day, and 1 in 5 use it ‘almost constantly.'”
One of Netspark’s safety tools is Canopy, an AI-powered tool that gives parents control to filter out harmful sexual digital content for their minor children, said Mr. Litwin, while giving children freedom to explore the internet.
Exploitative Content Expanding
The amount of CSAM online has gone up exponentially since generative AI became mainstream at the start of 2023, Mr. Litwin said. The problem is serious enough that all 50 states have asked Congress to institute a commission to study the problem of AI-generated CSAM, he said.
By Masooma Haq
