WIRED’s article “The AI-Generated Child Abuse Nightmare Is Here” reports on a disturbing trend: The creation of ultra-realistic, artificially generated images of child abuse by AI. Experts warn that criminals are using publicly available generative AI models to create new images of children who have already been abused. These perpetrators share datasets of abuse images to customize AI models and even offer monthly subscriptions to artificially generated abuse materials.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a non-profit organization from the UK that identifies and removes cases of abuse on the internet, described in a report in all detail, how this technology is misused. Their investigation of a dark web forum for abuse material revealed almost 3,000 illegally generated AI images.