In a written report, the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation urges governments and technology providers to act quickly before a flood of AI-generated images of child sexual abuse overwhelms law enforcement investigators and vastly expands the pool of potential victims.

In a first-of-its-kind case in South Korea, a man was sentenced in September to 2 1/2 years in prison for using artificial intelligence to create 360 virtual child abuse images, according to the Busan District Court in the country’s southeast.

What IWF analysts found were abusers sharing tips and marveling about how easy it was to turn their home computers into factories for generating sexually explicit images of children of all ages.

While the IWF’s report is meant to flag a growing problem more than offer prescriptions, it urges governments to strengthen laws to make it easier to combat AI-generated abuse.

Users can still access unfiltered older versions of Stable Diffusion, however, which are “overwhelmingly the software of choice ... for people creating explicit content involving children,” said David Thiel, chief technologist of the Stanford Internet Observatory, another watchdog group studying the problem.

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