The United Kingdom will make it a crime to possess, create or distribute artificial intelligence (AI) tools that generate sexual content aimed at children.
The United Kingdom will become the first country to introduce laws against artificial intelligence tools used to generate sexualized images of children, in an attempt to stop a phenomenon that the Secretary of the Interior, Yvette Cooper, said he was increasing.
The Government announced on Saturday that it would make illegal possess, create or distribute AI tools that generate abusive images, which makes it a punishable crime with up to five years in prison.
AI tools are being used to generate images of child sexual abuse “undressing” images of real life children or “sewing the faces of other children in existing images,” the government said.
It will also be a punishable crime with up to three years in prison to possess “pedophile manuals” that teach people how to use AI to sexually abuse children.
The new laws will also criminalize “predators that manage websites designed for other pedophiles to share content or advice of child sexual abuse on how to prepare children,” they are punished with up to 10 years in prison, the government said.
“This is a really disturbing phenomenon,” Cooper to Sky News told Sunday. “The child’s sexual abuse material is growing, but also the preparation of children and adolescents online. And what is happening now is that AI is putting this in steroids. “
She said that AI tools were facilitating that perpetrators “prepare children, and also means that they are manipulating images of children and then use them to draw and blackmail the young people to abuse themselves more.”
“It is the most vile of crimes,” he added. “Other countries are not doing this yet, but I hope everyone else is still.”
Cooper told the BBC on Sunday that a recent investigation had found that around 500,000 children throughout the United Kingdom are victims of child abuse every year, “and the online appearance of that is a growing and growing part of she”.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British non -profit organization focused on fighting online abuse, warned about the growing number of sexual abuse images of AI of children who occur.
During a period of 30 days in 2024, IWF analysts identified 3,512 images of child abuse of AI on a single dark website. The most serious category number also increased by 10 percent in one year, he found.
