Child abuse images created by AI is making it harder to protect victims as law enforcement find it more difficult to identify whether real children are at risk, National Crime Agency warns

Child abuse images created by artificial intelligence have made it harder to protect victims, the National Crime Agency warned yesterday.

The increasing use of realistic AI-generated child pornography has given law enforcement agencies issues over identifying whether real children are at risk.

Graeme Biggar, who became the NCA’s permanent director-general last summer, warned that the computer-generated images flooding the internet could normalise abuse of real victims – with up to 1.6 per cent of the UK’s adult population posing some degree of risk to children.

‘We have begun to see hyper-realistic images and videos entirely created through artificial intelligence,’ Mr Biggar said. ‘The use of AI for child sexual abuse will make it harder for us to identify real children who need protecting, and further normalise abuse. And that matters, because we assess that the viewing of these images – whether real or AI-generated – materially increases the risk of offenders moving on to sexually abusing children themselves.’

Mr Biggar said the NCA was seeking assurances from the companies that create AI software that safety measures would be added to the products. There had been discussions around adding a digital tag that indicated an image was AI-generated, he added.

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The National Crime Agency has warned that AI-generated pornography is making it harder to identify real children at risk

Mr Biggar’s warnings came as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said AI had the potential to enable criminals to produce ‘unprecedented quantities of life-like child sexual abuse imagery’.

The IWF said it had unearthed artificially generated images that contained category A and B material – the most severe kinds of sexual abuse – involving children as young as three.

Its analysts also discovered an online ‘manual’ written by offenders to explain to others how to train AI to create more realistic imagery.

The organisation said that despite the images not depicting real children, their creation was not a victimless crime and it could normalise the abuse of real victims – as well as making it harder to spot when real children were in danger.

The first global summit on AI safety will be held in the UK in the autumn, with Rishi Sunak calling for international cooperation to mitigate the risks posed by the technology.

IWF chief executive Susie Hargreaves said fit-for-purpose legislation needed to be brought in to get ahead of the threat posed by AI. She added: ‘We are sounding the alarm and saying the Prime Minister needs to treat the serious threat it poses as the top priority.’