Deepfake, AI, or Real? Child Sexual Exploitation Online

AI-generated Child Sexual Exploitation Material

• The use of AI to create child sexual exploitation material is becoming increasingly common, with the CyberSecurity Cooperative Research Centre identifying Australia as the third-largest market for online sexual abuse material.

Definition and Characteristics

• AI-created child sexual abuse material is defined as the production, through digital media, of child sexual abuse material and other wholly or partly artificial or digitally created sexualised images of children.
• Deepfakes refer to hyper-realistic multimedia content generated using AI techniques and algorithms, making it difficult to distinguish from genuine images.

Prevalence

• In 2023, an Internet Watch Foundation investigation revealed 20,254 AI-generated images on a dark web forum, with 11,108 assessed as likely criminal and 2,562 satisfying legal requirements for child sexual exploitation material.
• The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received over 49,500 reports of child sexual exploitation material in the 2023-2024 financial year, an increase of about 9,300 over the previous year.

Challenges in Policing

• Traditional methods of identifying child sexual exploitation material are inadequate due to AI's ability to rapidly generate new, unique content.
• The growing realism of AI-generated exploitation material is adding to the workload of the victim identification unit of the Australian Federal Police.

Combating AI-generated Content

• Emerging strategies involve leveraging AI technology itself to detect AI-generated content, such as training machine learning algorithms to detect subtle anomalies and patterns.
• Collaboration between technology companies, law enforcement, and AI developers is essential in the fight against the further proliferation of AI-generated child sexual exploitation material.

Industry Response

• Major social media companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon formed an alliance in 2024 to fight the use of AI for child sexual exploitation material.
• The chief executives of major social media companies faced a US senate committee on how they are preventing online child sexual exploitation and the use of AI to create these images.

This quiz explores the growing concern of AI-generated deepfake child sexual exploitation material and its impact on law enforcement efforts to protect children online.