Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she has taken to help tackle the use of AI in proliferating indecent images of children.

The Government recognises the serious and evolving threat posed by AI being misused to create child sexual abuse material. We know offenders will seek to exploit emerging technologies for their own sexual gratification.

AI-generated child sexual abuse is not a victimless crime. The material often includes depictions of real children, escalating the risk of contact abuse. The volume and realism of this material can make it increasingly challenging for safeguarding partners to identify and protect children. Offenders can also use these images to groom and blackmail children.

The Government announced in the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy that we will ban nudification apps and other tools designed to create synthetic non-consensual intimate images (NCII) to stop women and girls’ images being tampered with and exploited without their consent.

This Government is also introducing specific measures within the Crime and Policing Bill to tackle AI driven child sexual abuse. These include:

• Criminalising AI models that have been developed to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM). These optimised models produce hyper-realistic indecent images that often contains the likeness of real children. This offence will carry a sentence of up to five years
• Updating the existing law criminalising ‘paedophile manuals’ to cover AI as well. Manuals which provide guidance on how to use AI to create CSAM will be punishable by up to three years in prison.
• A new criminal offence to target moderators and administrators who run sites dedicated to child sexual abuse, including where these horrific images are created or advice is shared using AI. These crimes will now carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
• A further amendment to empower authorised bodies- including AI developers and child protection organisations- to scrutinise AI systems to help improve safeguards and prevent them generating harmful content in the first place.

These measures are part of this Government’s ongoing efforts to make sure offenders are held accountable for their actions and have no safe place to hide online.

UK law is crystal clear: child sexual abuse material is illegal, whether AI generated or not. Producing, storing, sharing or searching for any content depicting child sexual abuse is a criminal offence.