BOISE, Idaho — Attorney generals from all 50 states and U.S. territories sent a letter to the leaders of the United States Congress. Their message: action is needed to protect children being victimized by AI technology.
“There is a huge problem with AI when it comes to children. There's a lot of fake pictures that are being made of children, vulnerable people, whether they're real or fake pictures,” Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador said.
Labrador follows the topic of child exploitation closely, he said. His office goes to great lengths to fight against creators and possessors of explicit images and videos with children in them. Evolving technology takes it to a new level.
“Yesterday, my criminal division chief was showing me how you can just go to AI and say, I want to see a picture of a blond girl at the beach with a red dress. Within two seconds it creates an image. If you use your imagination, imagine what you can do. You can tell it to pretty much create anything. And it's horrendous some of the things that we're seeing out there,” Labrador said.
Labrador echoes what his AG colleagues have found: real children are being harmed.
“It's not just fake pictures that are a problem. They're taking faces of actual children and imposing them on bodies of prior children who had been abused. So you actually have children who are victimized twice,” Labrador said.
In their letter to Congress, the country’s top legal leaders says they know congress is looking at AI but they explain, “much of the focus has been on national security and education concerns. And while those interests are worthy of consideration, the safety of children should not fall through the cracks when evaluating the risks of AI.”
“We need to do something about it. In fact, our office is looking at introducing some legislation this year in Idaho. So at the state level to combat some of the things that that we need to do in the state of Idaho,” Labrador said.
Labrador told KTVB his office is still working on the specifics of legislation on the topic, but they know what they want to accomplish with it.
“There's already laws against child pornography. But we want to make sure that you're including these AI generated photos and that there's not a defense that these are fake in some way, that they're not real, that it wasn't a 'real child' that was being abused. The way AI works is that they're using all the pictures that are out there, and that's how they create these pictures,” Labrador said. “It's just that it's a form of exploitation of children. We want to make sure that we prevent that. We want to make sure that the legislature includes AI generated pictures in our child pornography laws.”
Labrador hopes new laws at the national level will be crafted quickly. While they wait, real work continues in Idaho to protect the exploitation of children.
“It tells you how abhorrent it is, how concerned we are, and how important it is for Congress to actually do something about it,” Labrador said.
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