UNICEF has urged countries to criminalize the creation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material and pushed developers to implement safety-by-design and stronger guardrails. The agency reported that 1.2 million children across 11 countries disclosed having images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes in the past year. Britain has proposed a ban on using AI tools to create such images, and chatbots like xAI's Grok have come under scrutiny for producing sexualized images even after warnings.
UNICEF Urges Nations To Criminalize AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Images Amid Rise In ‘Nudification’
A view shows the logo on the exterior of UNICEF's humanitarian warehouse in Copenhagen, Denmark, November 15, 2023. REUTERS/Tom Little
Feb 4 (Reuters) - The United Nations children's agency, UNICEF, on Wednesday urged governments to criminalize the creation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, saying it is alarmed by a growing use of artificial intelligence to produce images that sexualize children.
UNICEF called on AI developers to adopt safety-by-design practices and build robust guardrails into models to prevent misuse. The agency also urged digital platforms to strengthen content moderation and invest in detection technologies to stop these images from spreading online.
"The harm from deepfake abuse is real and urgent. Children cannot wait for the law to catch up," UNICEF said in a statement.
Deepfakes are AI-generated images, videos and audio that can convincingly impersonate real people. UNICEF specifically warned about the practice it described as the "nudification" of children — using AI to remove or alter clothing in photos to fabricate nude or sexualized images of minors.
The agency said at least 1.2 million children across 11 countries disclosed that their images had been manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes over the past year. UNICEF said criminalization, stronger platform safeguards and developer-led safety design are all needed to protect children.
On Saturday, Britain announced plans to make it illegal to use AI tools to create child sexual abuse images, which would make it the first country to propose such a ban.
Concerns have intensified about AI-generated sexual content involving minors, including outputs from chatbots such as xAI's Grok. A Reuters investigation found the chatbot continued to produce sexualized images of women and minors even after users warned that subjects had not consented.
xAI said on Jan. 14 it had restricted image-editing features for Grok users and, based on users' locations, blocked the generation of images of people in revealing clothing in "jurisdictions where it's illegal." The company did not specify which countries and had earlier limited image generation and editing features to paying subscribers.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward in Washington; editing by Michelle Nichols and Rod Nickel)
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