The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

AI is about to make the online child sex abuse problem much worse

A flood of AI-generated child pornography threatens to overwhelm the nation’s creaky reporting system for child exploitation, Stanford report warns

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April 22, 2024 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
The parent of an online child abuse victim attends a news conference on Capitol Hill following a Jan. 31 hearing on protecting children online. (Haiyun Jiang for The Washington Post)
5 min

The nation’s system for tracking down and prosecuting people who sexually exploit children online is overwhelmed and buckling, a new report finds — and artificial intelligence is about to make the problem much worse.

The Stanford Internet Observatory report takes a detailed look at the CyberTipline, a federally authorized clearinghouse for reports of online child sexual abuse material, known as CSAM. The tip line fields tens of millions of CSAM reports each year from such platforms as Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok, and forwards them to law enforcement agencies, sometimes leading to prosecutions that can bust up pedophile and sex trafficking rings.