Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers has signed on to a letter, along with 54 other Attorneys General, urging Congress to study how artificial intelligence (AI) is used to exploit children through child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and to propose legislation to protect children from those abuses.
“We know artificial intelligence and generative AI is a fast, really rapidly changing technological space… and it’s a place where we have a great concern that the pace of technology is going to is going to create opportunities to harm children,” Attorney General Hilgers told KLIN News.
The coalition distinguishes the dangers of AI as it relates to CSAM into three main categories:
- A real child’s likeness who has not been physically abused being digitally altered in a depiction of abuse
- A real child who has been physically abused being digitally recreated in other depictions of abuse
- A child who does not exist being digitally created in a depiction of abuse that feeds the market for CSAM
The letter warns that AI is already being used to generate CSAM. The letter explains, “AI tools can rapidly and easily create ‘deepfakes’ by studying real photographs of abused children to generate new images showing those children in sexual positions. . . . Deepfakes can also be generated by overlaying photographs of otherwise unvictimized children on the internet with photographs of abused children to create new CSAM involving the previously unharmed children.”
Attorney General Hilgers and the rest of the coalition ask Congress to form a commission to study specifically how AI can be used to exploit children and to “act to deter and address child exploitation, such as by expanding existing [federal] restrictions on CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated CSAM.”