UK will make it a crime to possess, create or distribute artificial intelliegence (AI) tools that generate sexual content targeting children.
The United Kingdom is set to become the first country to introduce laws against artificial intelligence tools used to generate sexualised images of children, in an attempt to curb a phenomenon that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said was increasing.
The government announced on Saturday that it would make it illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools that generate abusive images, making it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
AI tools are being used to generate child sexual abuse images by “nudeifying” real-life images of children or by “stitching the faces of other children onto existing images”, said the government.
It will also be a crime punishable by up to three years in prison to possess AI “paedophile manuals” that teach people how to use AI to sexually abuse children.
The new laws will also criminalise “predators who run websites designed for other paedophiles to share vile child sexual abuse content or advice on how to groom children”, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, said the government.
“This is a real disturbing phenomenon,” Cooper told Sky News on Sunday. “Online child sexual abuse material is growing, but also the grooming of children and teenagers online. And what’s now happening is that AI is putting this on steroids.”
She said AI tools were making it easier for perpetrators “to groom children, and it’s also meaning that they are manipulating images of children and then using them to draw and to blackmail young people into further abuse”.
“It’s just the most vile of crimes,” she added. “Other countries are not yet doing this, but I hope everyone else will follow.”
Cooper told the BBC on Sunday that a recent inquiry had found that around 500,000 children across the UK are victims of child abuse of some form each year, “and the online aspect of that is an increasing and growing part of it”.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British non-profit focused on combating online abuse, has warned of the growing number of sexual abuse AI images of children being produced.
Over a 30-day period in 2024, IWF analysts identified 3,512 AI child abuse images on a single dark web site. The number of the most serious category of images also rose by 10 percent in a year, it found.
