AI giving offenders ‘DIY child sexual abuse’ tool, as dozens of child victims used in AI models, IWF warns MPs

The IWF has welcomed upcoming new legislation while giving evidence in Parliament this week.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has told MPs how new rules to curb the spread of AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery will address the loopholes which currently give criminals access to their own “DIY child sexual abuse generation” tools.

Yesterday (March 27), Dan Sexton, Chief Technology Officer at the IWF, gave evidence in Parliament to the Crime and Policing Bill Committee.

Mr Sexton welcomed the proposed new legislation, telling MPs how IWF analysts have discovered dozens of AI models trained on real victims of child sexual abuse, designed to recreate their suffering in new AI-generated imagery.

In February, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a raft of new legislation designed to address the rise of life-like child sexual abuse material generated by AI.

New clauses in the upcoming Crime and Policing Bill will outlaw the possession and distribution of AI models that have been optimised to create child sexual abuse imagery and will also criminalise the possession of manuals which provide instructions on how offenders can use AI to generate child sexual abuse imagery.

The IWF was among the first to sound the alarm about the spread of AI and synthetic child sexual abuse imagery and has long campaigned for these measures to be introduced.

Speaking at the Committee, Mr Sexton welcomed the proposed legislation. He said the while AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery is already illegal in the UK, additional legislation to ban models designed to create this material, and guides explaining how to use them, will be a very welcome step.

Mr Sexton told MPs: “Those two things could be shared freely on the internet – effectively giving people a DIY child sexual abuse generation tool which they could download to create their own content.

“The hope is these clauses will firstly give us some ability to ban, remove, take down this content - but also, crucially, to remove some of the ambiguity there is online about what is legal and what is not.

“That ambiguity itself, we see, causes people to sometimes commit acts they would not perhaps have otherwise done had they known it was illegal.”

Justice Minister Alex Davies-Jones, asked about the real-world impact of child sexual abuse imagery on children.

Mr Sexton replied: “We see models which have been trained specifically on child sexual abuse, often trained on particular victims.

“Offenders will collect images of a particular victim, and what these tools have given them is the ability not just to complete their collections, but create more content of children that have already been abused, sometimes many years ago.

“These victims are survivors now, and not only is their abuse not finished, but they are getting more content being created.

“In one instance we found 128 individual models each trained on a specific victim, with the intention of creating more imagery of those victims – so it is not a victimless crime.”

The IWF will continue to work to support measures to disrupt the generation of AI child sexual abuse material as the Bill progresses through Parliament.

However, the work does not end with the Crime and Policing Bill. The IWF says AI companies have a critical role to play, with some already working with the IWF to prevent the production of child sexual abuse imagery.

The IWF will continue to call on Government to ensure the forthcoming AI Bill includes robust safety-by design provisions to prevent the generation of this material.