Man Arrested for Creating Child Porn Using AI

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A Florida man is facing 20 counts of obscenity for allegedly creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography, highlighting the danger and ubiquity of generative AI being used for nefarious reasons.

Phillip Michael McCorkle was arrested last week while he was working at a movie theater in Vero Beach, Florida, according to TV station CBS 12 News. A crew from the TV station captured the arrest, which made for dramatic video footage due to law enforcement leading away the uniform-wearing McCorkle from the theater in handcuffs.

The investigation kicked off after Indian River County Sheriff's Office received tips that McCorkle was prompting an AI image generator to make child sexual imagery and distributing it via the social media app Kik.

McCorkle's arrest was part of a county operation taking down people possessing child pornography, but the generative AI wrinkle in this particular arrest shows how technology is generating new avenues for crime and child abuse.

What Safeguards

The increasing tide of generated AI child sexual abuse imagery has prompted federal, state and local lawmakers to push legislation to make this type of porn illegal, but it's not clear how effectively it can be stopped.

Last year, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 4,700 reports of generated AI child porn, with some criminals even using generative AI to make deepfakes of real children to extort them.

A 2023 study from Stanford University also revealed that hundreds of child sex abuse images were found in widely-used generative AI image data sets.

Put it all together, and you've got a seemingly uncontrollable problem.

"The content that we’ve seen, we believe is actually being generated using open source software, which has been downloaded and run locally on people’s computers and then modified," Internet Watch Foundation chief technology officer Dan Sexton told The Guardian last year.

"And that is a much harder problem to fix."

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