Family and Friends Forum

Thank you for flagging this for us. Anyone else feeling overwhelmed with the never ending risk factors, if not for our people, but for our children/grandchildren?

Interesting read,

I do wonder though if it's an excuse some use to explain away their behaviour, the AI images can be extremely realistic and still the route cause to create or find these images is the same as creating/finding these images of a real child.

I think they definitely should be treated the same in sentencing/rehabilitation as if they were real child images.

*my person is under investigation purely for AI images, even the arresting officers couldn't tell they were AI they were so realistic.

he said the same about it not harming anyone in real life and I believe he is denial about the seriousness and consequences he will face.

I have faced the same fall out and consequences as many other family's and would expect him to be treated as such not any less consequences because it was AI.

Bondi,

I agree that they are equally damaging to all involved. My concerns about them as a mother to young adults is the same as with the increasing amount of young people prosecuted for iioc crimes stemming from peer to peer sharing of images. Unless impacted by the knock there are few people who are up to date with what we educate our children on. It seems very much like we are waiting for the education side of things to catch up with technology and the legislation around it.
AI images can also be viewed differently by society and can be sent on unsolicited which we have seen on here.
Obviously anyone searching for such material should be punished and rehabilitated in accordance with the law, none of us would dispute that I just think it raises more questions around how to educate people at the same rate as technology advances xx

It is a scary at how over accessible the world on the Internet sometimes, I have sons myself and worry they stumble into this when they are older/curious naive.

Education definitely needs to catch up as technology is only going to advance,

, my sons are much more tech savy and who knows where AI and even virtual reality will progress to. It terrifies me the future!

I imagine until the AI is abused more and more in this manor and 'takes the public/press/political parties interest' not much will happen -

as you say until you have joined our club you don't realise what is out there before/during/after 'the knock'

This debate becomes more complicated, because the term AI includes a lot of different things. There are images that look like real people, but those people do not actually exist. Then there are images that combine faces of real people with fake bodies, known as 'pseudo-photographs', and finally there are cartoon images, which do not look real, such as anime or hentai.

The UK has made all three of these illegal, but in most other countries there are differences in the law. Anime and hentai are not illegal in most of the world. The UK is an outlier in that regard.

So while I agree with LFF that AI images that use the faces of real children do cause harm, there is a seperate debate needed about anime and hentai. LFF claims that these cartoon images 'normalise' the sexualisation of children, but if that were the case then Japan, where these images are most commonly found, should be facing an epidemic of child abuse. It isn't and that raises questions for me, about how cartoon images are actually harming real children 'around the world', as LFF claims.

Dear Forum Users

Thank you for your comments on this thread and for taking an interest in the important topic of AI-generated images, as it is something that not enough people are currently aware of. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation took part in lots of press coverage last week about the legality of AI-generated indecent images of children. As lots of you have mentioned, these images do cause harm and are illegal. By depicting child sexual abuse, they contribute to the ongoing harm these images create and can reinforce harmful sexual attitudes if they are used. Just to be clear our comments in the media last week described AI-generated IIOC, not specifically Anime/Henati as suggested in one user post.

We would like to clarify that Anime is not illegal in the UK, nor is Hentai. These only become illegal if they depict child sexual abuse or the sexualisation of children (according to the Coroners and Justice Act 2009). There are many other countries where this fictional harmful content is illegal, such as Canada, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Poland and New Zealand to name a few. However, we do recognise, that there is still a long way to go and not everywhere has caught up with the development in technology as well as the increase in popularity of harmful fictional content. It is difficult to compare child sexual abuse in other countries as laws can vary significantly around the world due to differences in the age of consent, as well as policing strengths.

More generally, what we do know is that where people are in environments and communities where harmful sexual content is common, wherever this may be, there is the risk of it contributing towards the development of harmful attitudes and beliefs around sex, such as the normalisation of child sexual abuse.

We hope this thread can help shed more light on this constantly evolving and concerning area.

Take Care

The Forum Team