A coalition of attorneys general from 50 states and four territories is asking Congress to study and regulate the use of artificial intelligence to exploit children and create child sexual abuse material.
The coalition, led by South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, sent a letter to the House and the Senate on Tuesday asking for legislation to rein in AI-generated child pornography. The letter called for Congress to form a commission to study how AI is used to exploit children and to address it through legal actions such as expanding existing restrictions on the material.
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Congress is preparing to address a multitude of legal problems related to AI.
"We are engaged in a race against time to protect the children of our country from the dangers of AI. Indeed, the proverbial walls of the city have already been breached," the attorneys general argued. "Now is the time to act."
"AI brings the potential for a lot of good, but also kicks open the door for a lot of wrongdoing," Wilson said in a statement. "We need to make sure children aren't harmed as this technology becomes more widespread, and when Congress comes back from recess, we want this request to be one of the first things they see on their desks."
The threats include the use of AI to create "deepfake" child sex abuse material based on images of children who have already been abused, as well as the creation of images using fictitious children to create adult content.
"The argument would be, 'well, I'm not harming anyone — in fact, it's not even a real person,' but you're creating demand for the industry that exploits children," Wilson told the Associated Press.
Wilson stated that he also supports actions on a state level, noting that the technology's problems are significant enough to demand state and federal attention.
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The Senate has been taking additional steps to understand the technology. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer organized three senator-only hearings on AI over the summer. He has also scheduled additional "summits" to help Congress better grasp the technology. The first is scheduled later in September and will feature Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia President Jensen Huang, and several other leaders from Silicon Valley.
Thousands of AI-generated child sex images have already been found on the dark web, according to some child safety groups. The images confuse the tracking software used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children because they are newly generated images. That also makes them hard for other companies to counter or restrict.