Can AI image generators be policed to prevent explicit deepfakes of children?

Child abusers are creating AI-generated "deepfakes" of their targets in order to blackmail them into filming their own abuse, beginning a cycle of sextortion that can last for years. Creating simulated child abuse imagery is illegal in the UK, and Labour and the Conservatives have aligned on the desire to ban all explicit AI-generated images of real people. But there is little global agreement on how the technology should be policed. Worse, no matter how strongly governments take action, the creation of more images will always be a press of a button away – explicit imagery is built into the foundations of AI image generation. In December, researchers at Stanford University made a disturbing discovery: buried among the billions of images making up one of the largest training sets for AI image generators was hundreds, maybe thousands, of instances of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).