Don't want to be an American. Thursday Maritis short day. We've got reds baseball here on seven hundred wlwas eleven o'clock to get inside pitch and try and take three or four from the Marlins for getting back home. That's the fun part. This is the sickening part for you of the news cycle. So this guy in Ohio man just became the first person in America to be convicted of our new federal AI deep fake porn law. But Ohio itself has no law concerning AI child pornography. That's
not a state crime. So how's that possible in light of this case? And by the way, we have not one, but two brand new cases involving deep fake AI porn for underage people in both Evandelle and Mason. Joining the show from Ohioans for Child Protection is Rebecca Scherendorf. Good morning, Rebecca, how you.
Been oh doing good? Thanks for drawing attention to that.
Well, I'm not drawing attention to it. I think the news cycle is because we've had three big cases this week. I mentioned we'll get We'll get to the charges against this guy from Hilliard, Ohio. James Strellier is his Estraller is his name from up in Columbus, and it's pretty disturbing when you look at the details of the case him.
But we have a seven year old Mason who's in a Warren County Juvenile court fifty plus family charges for pandering sexual ordered material involving a minor a two year
about a year long investigation. I should say it involves AI generated explicit images where in this case a girl's face was put on a fake body to make her look naked and rain Phoenix Brown out of Evandale in Hamlin County's twenty four year old three charges of pandering involving a minor, pandering sexual oriented material, involving a minor,
in illegal use of minor, and nudity ordered material. Same thing here and I mentioned the big case is James darld of the second from Columbus installed twenty four over twenty four AI platforms and over one hundred web based AI models on his phone and use that to harass at least six adult women for a period of about a year or two and created porn depicting victim and sex acts with her own father and then distributed to
her co workers. And they found literally hundreds of images in another thousand or so a couple thousand on his phone, and he is the first person in the US CONVICTI or to take it down. Act. I know, that's a lot to throw at you this morning, but we have two local stories, god knows how many more, and of course this case here in Ohio of James Stroller. The second forty five states have laws criminalizing AI generator computed editor edited. It's called ce SAM is what they what
it's called. And maybe you can explain that terminology and kind of set it up for us here before we get to talking about what's really going on.
Yeah, so there's a few things. First of all, Ohio, we do have the child pornography in statute, and the nation's been shifting to child sex abuse material. That's the sea SAM term, and that's just to recenter the fact that a child is abused when there is pornography made of a child, and that this is part of the
abuse and the revictimization. So just as people hear this and see it in the news and whatnot, it doesn't quite align with our terminology here in Ohio, but for the nations shifting that way because this is not a victimalist crime by any stretch of the imagination. And while those are three high profile cases happening both in our community, within our state and whatnot, I think this is just
a drop in the bucket. Basically, studies are indicating the child online exploitations is currently sitting in about one in six kids are being exploited online. That can take many forms, such as being sex storted into producing sexual images of themselves.
They can be getting paid to produce material, which sadly, children that are read are all the higher targets for this kind of exploitation, and once there are images of them generated, this in turn could lead to escalating behavior like I've heard of pathways where a child was first just paid to take a picture of their feet and share it, which would seem very harmless to a child to share a picture of their feet right, and before you know it is escalated into having to conduct violent
set backs against the peer and record it and share it with the offender. And this is another layer in it is that the online exploitation can then spread into the minor exploiting their peers and those around them getting exploited as well. And although high ones for child protection. We're concerned that our Statehouse is not keeping pace. We have lawmakers like Senator Blessing and Senator Johnson, which has introduced SB one sixty three to address a C stamps
in our state. But there's probably another dozen plus bills that need to be passed in Columbus right now, and then we need a broad look at our policies and ask ourselves is this really keeping case? Because the CDC is estimating that about one in four girls are being sexually abused by Aug. Eighteen, and the boys fall somewhere between the one in six to one in ten mark most likely closer to one in six if you consider the harm from online exploitation, which can be very real.
I mean we see these committee suicide.
Yeah. I think we had a case in I want to say in Lawrenceburg, maybe not too long ago. Same thing happened there. There was an exploitation thing. And the sick part about it is you look at this James Stralo, the second first guy convicted thirty seven years old. The charges by the way, cyberstalking, producing Obstein, visual representations of
child sexual abuse, and publication of digital forgeries. He had all these AI platforms installed on his phone and created porn depicting a victim and sex act with her own father, and then sent it to her co workers. And of course it was just you know, her face, but it was AI generated on top of a naked body. Image of a naked body. And he posted AI generated images
of children using faces of boys from his community. And they found seven over seven hundred images on a child sexually bust website, another twenty four hundred roughly on his phone. So this is the first person US convicted under the Take It Down Act. So talk about the dispairity, walk the listeners through with the gap in Ohio versus the federal law right now.
So right now, SB one sixty three does a few things that we don't have in federal law. First of all, one of the sections requires a watermark on AI generated
material that indicates that it is AI generated. I think this could be useful because if the technology companies have to provide the water mark and it's there, at least if you have an afarious factor using the tool incorrectly and illegally, there is that chance at least that the watermark is still going to stay on it as long as they don't remove it, which is a separate crime
than removing of the water mark. And so this will actually be protecting people on multiple levels because if you think of the Columbus area case, I mean we have adult women, adult men because that father is just as much a victim in this, and we also even have
young boys that were targeted by this man. So we have a wide range of people that are being targeted with this AI pornography and also the deep fakes, because there are other things beyond sexual exploitation that could still be very problematic to be detecting people doing and can result in loss of jobs. There have been cases where AI has been used to have someone say some really offensive things in which their job was on the line.
I believe it was a school principle that was targeted in a case that was highlighted by Attorney General Gates in his committee testimony on SBS one sixty three, and then also our bill, the bill that Center of Blessing Johnson brought. It is a civil course of action to victims, and I think it is so very important that first of all, victims should have access to civil court. They're
there for a reason. It is a valid part of our justice system, but also it creates an incentive for the tech companies and for the individuals not to engage in that that they too can face three percussions.
Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how. I wonder how Yeah, I wonder how hard it is for them to stop creating? You know, it's I would no one listening right now other than maybe one person possibly understand how AI works, right, and how you're able to simply turn that that that element off. By the way, So Rebecca Scherndorf, she's on the show with a Highlands for child protection. She was critical during the clergy abuse cases, and now we're talking
about something called Sea SAM. It's called child sexual abuse material. You heard the name James strall of the second of Columbus, just a horrific criminal here involving AI generated images used on women and some children. And now two cases one in Mason one and Evendale. Uh, where you have younger people that are using AI to generate naked images of people or they take their face and their likeness and put it on essentially an AI generated nude body and
then disseminating it to other students. In the case of Straller, he was doing it with women that that he knew and was doing in the workplace. Different story, But on those two things, amazing case I said involves this, believe seventeen year old, I said, facing fifty plus collomny charges. The court didn't mention AI specifically there, and that's an element of it. And the stroller case is children and women.
So when you look at it, is AI generated se SAM, which by the way, is child sexual abuse material that term a lot se SAM. It's crossing all demographic lines right now. And does the law dictate that it's specifically about children or its include adults for everyone.
This actually is offering protection to everyone, and it goes a step further to also protect you from someone feeling your identity using.
AI gotcha, which which is.
The impact seniors and financial crimes. So I think the senators try to make a well rounded bill here and it should sit in state law as well. We shouldn't leave room for criminals to be able to exploit people in our state because we don't have as robusts of laws as the other forty five states in the country.
Yeah, this is an interesting angle from me. I guess the First Amendment standpoint because this is going to be things like this are going to be challenged, and that's the way the law works. You know, you don't have to agree with going, well, we should be protecting children and innocent people from this nonsense. However, the Constitution talks about First Amendment. What dictates in the first Amendment. So I'm looking at case right now out of Sturgis and
this guy, I think Sturgis, Wisconsin. I want to say that the age there is upholding a federal or a statute to state statute that band's possession of child sex dolls and computer generated sexual material and includes identifiable features, and so the sex doll that looks like a child, it's kind of disturbing. They want to continue to enforce that.
There are critics out there that argue purely AI generated images, ones that don't use a real child's face, unlike the ones we're talking about here, are victimless and protected expression. What's your response to that argument, we're talking about AI generate image is not of real people in their face, but rather just AI generated bodies, naked bodies and in this case of children. What do you make of that?
Well, I think if we look at this in the larger contexts that rain estimates that sexual violent crimes, the actual individuals only have about a two percent conviction ery, and part of the problem is the delayed disclosure which Ohio has an old statute limitations while in the book that isn't updated to reflect the rest of the country on this. But take that load conviction ery and then
look at what other states have done. They have found that individuals that buy these child sextuals are actually most
likely offenders. And it's a much easier case to make that you have purchased something like this which is clearly for use for sexualizing a child and also can be used in a grooming process if you think about it, but it is most certainly not a normal purchest and is its own red flag behavior, And so some states have gone the route of criminalizing those kinds of devices, such as child sex fells, in order to identify more
child exploiters. As a free speech we have a long history of regulating things that you say and material that you can produce when it causes harm to others. And when you have tens of millions of images that do not depict an actual person but is still sexualizing children, you are moving a certain group of people along a tangent of exploitative thoughts about minors, and they may start
acting on them. An example of this, as there has been an uptick in strangulation content in regular pornograph, there has been a corresponding uptick of strangulation on our college campuses. Now, strangulation is a felony, and you can survive a strangulation and still die later because this is actually cutting off
the blood to your brain and you're strangled. This is more involved than like holding your breath, right, this is just oxygen that we're talking about, and a person that's been strangled is actually at risk of strokes even six
months later posts surviving the strangulation. But you have young people that see this material and it's been normalized as a kink, even though it is deeply harmful and a pelony, right, And I think that's just an example of where you see a performance of something that's harmful sexually seeping out into the real world and harming real people.
It's going to be an interesting challenge because, as you said that, I don't disagree with you because it's horrific what we're talking about here, Rebecca, But he said you know, they watch AI generated images which aren't real things. I mean,
it's like it's like a cartoon. Essentially, it looks a real life, but it's it's not real in real life, if that makes sense, And they might act on that, see that, and that's a slippery slope, I think from a constitutional perspective, and I think you'd agree with me. Is like, Okay, well I have a gun and I might shoot someone and commit a homicide. I may, I may not. That's a slippery slope right there that they you know under the law, I guess under don't. I
know IF's habeous corpus or not. But essentially it's like, okay, in this case, when we're talking about real people, there are real victims there, whereas with AI generated image there is no victim.
Well, and I think this is going to depend on the details. And this is why we import and judges, because our lawmakers put the words on paper, and then our prosecutors have discretions from there, and then we still have our grand jury in place even before charges are brought, and then it goes before a judge and a jury, right, and those processes are in place. Actually, they add a
whole other layer to our law. There's what's written in statute, and then there's the case law that occurs after the writing of a statute, and so you can have aspects of it that are tossed out when there are valid
concerns regarding free speech. But at the same time, it's soll legal for you and i's goes, you know, to the stereotypical theater and shoutfire, and we may get into a situation where someone claims, well, that wasn't actually this individual, but they altered their image just enough, right, sure, because there's also problems with real child sex abuse material then being altered by AI to make it look safe in order to claim then that it's okay.
Yeah, I think people like the Straller guys should be buried underneath the jail quite honestly, and anyone doing this stuff to exploit people it's criminal. But we do have to watch the constitution constitutionalia. But I think we're all rooting for these people to go to prison or worse. But at the same time, I understand the perils of enacting a law that says, hey, anything AI generated is is you know, if it's child porn, it's no go.
It's It's going to be an interesting conversation that's going to develop, for sure, but I appreciate what you do. Rebecca Scherndorf for ohioshines for child Protection as Ohio now tries to get their laws up to speed here to match the federal on we have a man in Columbus,
first one prosecuted under this new law federally. The DOJ believes first person in the United States convict him to the Take It Down Act is James Stroller out of Columbus, Ohio, and just absolutely horrific things that he did to women and involving AI and deep fake porn. Rebecca, all the best, Thanks for jumping on this morning. Love it all right, Yes maam you too. We got to get a news update in run a little bit late here on this
Thursday morning. We have Reds Baseball coming up and hopefully how about three out of four in Miami that would be awesome before they head back here against the Angels. We'll have it for you today inside Pitch at eleven o'clock on the Home of the Red seven hundred ww