How AI is being abused to create child sexual abuse material

I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. The E Safety Commissioner Julie Van Grant says one hundred thousand Australians a month have access to an app that allows users to upload images of other people, including miners, to receive a depiction of what they would look like naked.

Well, technology has always been used to facilitate child sexual abuse, and child sex offenders.

Are often among the early adopters self.

We go back to nineteen eighty six when the then US Attorney General did a commission on pornography.

In their final report.

They stated very clearly that child sex offenders were using computer networks to trade child sexual abuse material, but also to network with each other, share tactics of abuse and procuring children. In the realm of safeguarding children, there's always been a concern about technology, and as we're seeing in

And contrary to.

Myth that this is harmless, all of these programs that generate images or videos have actually been trained on photographs of real children, if not existing child exploitation material. You know, when we look at, for example, the nature of the images that are being generated, that are becoming more and more creative, and you know, it's a very low barrier

You can download an immature two of your classmate, and for five cases this is a girls or women. You put it into the online website and it generates a deep nude, so an accurate depiction of what that person would look like naked.

And this is something that Australia is Easafety Commissioner recently pointed out as an area of particular concern just how prolific the use of these apps is.

We have any sense of how many Australian children or young people have used.

It for these particular sites that we're taking action against, we know at least one hundred thousand visits. It's a month, one hundred thousand visits a month from Australia.

So what is the legal landscape here and how much power does law enforcement have in what sounds like a very rapidly changing space.

Well, there is low hanging fruit for governance for legislators to pick off, such as apps like Newdify, apps whose sole purpose is nefarious. There's no good intention behind an app that is designed to remove.

The clothing of a clothed.

Photograph of someone without their consent, presumably, so you know, outlawering.

Those sorts of apps.

But it is very hard to keep up because whereas in the past with the development and release of technologies, there's sort of be a kind of a minimum time frame where you could expect something to become publicly available, but there's no limits, now there's no or there's very few limits, and the technology itself is becoming smarter and smarter and faster and faster. So it's very hard for

Terms of actually enforcing the law.

In terms of detecting crime, it becomes a case of needing to fight fire with fire. It becomes a case of needing to empower law enforcement with the relevant AI software to combat these AI rms. We need victim id tools available to law enforcement, tools that also can be applied to the reviewing process of child exploitation material to be able to discern whether it is quote unquote real or has been generated by a computer. So yeah, it's a complex and it's a rapidly shifting space.

And when it comes to all of these apps, this tech, the default is that they are legal until they're not. So when it comes to legislation around this, where does Australia sit globally?

Australia is once a front runner in certain areas and then in others we lag. And some of that has

Coming up?

Will governments worldwide stand up to tech companies.

Let's get some more now on that national roundtable in Parliament House where child safety advocates have been discussing the threat artificial intelligence poses to child safety. Former Australian of the Year and advocate for Survivors of child sexual abuse, Grace Tame has been calling on the government to prevent AI.

Being used to create child abuse material.

You recently attended around table at Parliament House which was around discussing child safety online including AI abuse material. Can you tell me a bit about how that went and whether or not you get the sense that this government is taking the issue as seriously as it should.

I think it should be commended that we're able to have these discussions that bring together a combination of politicians, of people who work in the tech industry.

Of law enforcement, lawyers.

Child safety advocates, academics who are all essentially working towards the same end, and that is keeping children safe from harm. I find it hard sometimes not to be cynical. You know, we've gone I think broad on change, broad on education and awareness raising of the potential harms and the very real harms faced by children both on and offline, but we haven't gone deeper. I am always struck when I have conversations with everyday people who don't work in safe guiding children.

I'm always struck by how little they know, which is to.

Everyone's detriment and it's to the benefit of perpetrators. I don't think that we, really, generally speaking, in the broader population, have an appropriate level of awareness of just how a dark this world is.

Yeah, so, I mean.

It's obviously a complex thing to tackle, but specifically, what would you like to see from the Australian government.

So obviously there's been a lot of hype around consent education and respectful relationships education rollouts in recent years, and while I think they are significant and important milestones, the next step is for grooming prevention education that is not just targeted towards children, but targeted towards parents, teachers, childcare workers, essentially anyone who has a duty of care to a

So I would like to see grooming.

Prevention education as the next key focus area in terms of prevention.

Broad education will not tick that box.

It needs to be highly specialized because we're up against a high specialized cohort of offenders that's often deliberately harm children, and there's also the opportunity to criminalize the possession of certain apps that are clearly solely designed to cause harm.

And you mentioned the power that the tech industry wields. Given that, what sense do you get of how successful governments can be in getting their cooperation in changing the products that they make.

We've seen very little action on the part of governments worldwide to actually stand up to these tech companies that are producing products that they.

Know are used to harm children. You know, with encryption.

Now embedded in even platforms like Facebook, we're seeing offenders grooming children on these platforms and going undetected because there's no way to find these conversations.

Then when it comes to tools.

That are able to generate images, it is capable obviously.

Of creating things that don't exist in real life.

So this ceiling of depravity that reality has doesn't exist online.

And then the concern.

Is as well that if you're getting individuals who are producing and consuming this ever more depraved material, that when they do actually come into contact with a child that they are intending to harm, that they are going to, you know, push those limits of violence even further because they have been desensitized to you know, a quote unquote normal boundaries of interaction, but profit is the big motivator a certainly over protection.

Well, Grace, thank you for taking the time to talk to me about all of this today.

Thanks for having me on and Ruby, I really appreciate it.

Also in the news today, Australia has condemned an Israeli strike on Harmas targets in Qatar that killed six people, including the son of Hamas's exiled Gaza chief and top negotiator. Qatar is a security partner of the United States and has acted as a mediator alongside Egypt in ceasefire talks between Israel and Tamas for a ceasefire in Gaza. Hamas has described the attack as an attempt to assassinate the