AI: Child Sexual Abuse Material

Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge Excerpts

Wednesday 30th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, through the Crime and Policing Bill, the Government will introduce a new suite of measures to tackle the growing threat of AI. This includes criminalising AI models made or adapted to generate child sexual abuse imagery and extending the existing paedophile manuals offence to cover AI-generated child sexual abuse material. In addition, the Home Office will bolster the network of undercover online police officers to target online offenders and develop cutting-edge AI tools and other new capabilities to infiltrate live streams and chat rooms where children are groomed. The Home Office is developing options at pace on potential device operating system-level safety controls to prevent online exploitation and abuse of children. It is also vital that we tackle the widespread sharing of self-generated indecent imagery. The report shows that 91% of the images are self-generated. This is young people who are being groomed and often quite innocently sharing their material, not realising the purpose for which it will be used. This is a huge and pressing issue, and my noble friend quite rightly raises that we need to take action now to tackle this scourge.

[Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge (Con)]

My Lords, it is clear that, with the constant evolution of technology, we risk not being able to legislate rapidly enough to keep pace. How are the Government conducting their horizon scanning to ensure that we are always one step ahead of those who seek to abuse children in this way?

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is quite right that we have to keep the technology up to date, and of course we are endeavouring to do that. I should say that UK law applies to AI-generated CSAM in the same way as to real child sexual abuse. Creating, possessing or distributing any child sex abuse images, including those generated by AI, is illegal. Generative AI child sexual abuse imagery is priority illegal content under the Online Safety Act in the same way as real content. However, she is quite right: we have to keep abreast of the technology. We are working at pace across government to make sure that we have the capacity to do that.