In London, Europe’s largest hotline for finding and removing AI child sexual abuse material announced that it has removed more websites in the last six months than it did in the entire previous year.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), based in the UK, stated that many of the images and videos of children being hurt look so real that it can be hard to tell them apart from pictures of real children. This issue has gotten worse because new AI technology can create these harmful images, which are illegal in the UK.
From April 2023 to March 2024, the IWF removed 70 reports of this material. But from April 2024 to the end of September 2024, they removed 74 reports. Most of the harmful content was found on public areas of the internet, with a large portion hosted in Russia (36%), the United States (22%), and Japan (11%).
More than three-quarters of the reports came from people who accidentally found this disturbing material, while the rest were discovered by IWF experts.
Derek Ray-Hill, the interim chief executive of the IWF, said, “People should understand that AI-generated child sexual abuse material causes terrible harm, not just to those who see it but also to the real survivors who suffer every time their abuse is shared.”
He explained that to make these realistic AI images, the software had to be trained using existing pictures and videos of real child victims. Ray-Hill warned that this problem is getting worse and urged lawmakers to update the laws to better protect children in the digital world.
