Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people were prosecuted for the (a) creation, (b) distribution and (c) ownership of entirely AI-generated indecent images of children in 2024.

The Ministry of Justice publishes data on prosecutions for a wide range of offences, including offences involving the possession, creation and distribution of indecent images of children. Data up to and including June 2024 is available in the Outcomes by Offences data tool that can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-justice-statistics-quarterly.

However, data held centrally does not include whether the offence involved AI-generated images or use of nudifying apps. This information may be held in the court records but to examine individual court records would be of disproportionate cost.

In relation to images of adults, it is already a criminal offence to share, or threaten to share, a sexually explicit deepfake image of an adult without consent, but not an offence to make one. The Government made a clear manifesto commitment to ban the creation of sexually explicit deepfake images, a central aspect of our commitment to halve the prevalence of violence against women and girls within the decade. We are bringing forward legislation to honour that commitment in the Crime and Policing Bill which will be introduced later this year, making this behaviour criminal so that perpetrators can be brought to justice.