A Disney Channel child star told Sky News she “broke down crying” after learning a criminal had used artificial intelligence (AI) to create sexual abuse images using her face.
Kaylin Hayman, who is 16, came home from school one day and received a phone call from the FBI. An investigator told her that a man who lived thousands of miles away had sexually raped her without her knowledge.
Kaylin’s face, the investigator said, had been superimposed on images of adults performing sexual acts.
“I burst into tears when I heard it,” Kaylin says. “It feels like an invasion of my privacy. It doesn’t seem real that someone I don’t know can see me that way.”
Kaylin has starred for several seasons on the Disney Channel television series Just Roll With It and was victimized along with other child actors.
“At that moment my innocence was taken away from me,” he adds. “In those images, I was a 12-year-old girl and it was heartbreaking to say the least. I felt very alone because I didn’t know that this was actually a crime that was happening in the world.”
But Kaylin’s experience is far from unique. Last year there were 4,700 reports of images or videos of sexual exploitation of children made by generative AI, according to figures from the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
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AI-generated images of child sexual abuse are now so realistic that law enforcement experts are forced to spend countless disturbing hours discerning which of these images are computer simulated and which contain real, live victims.
That’s the job of investigators like Terry Dobrosky, a cybercrime specialist in Ventura County, California.
“The stuff the AI is producing now is so realistic it’s disturbing,” he says. “Someone could claim in court, ‘Oh, I thought that was actually AI-generated. I didn’t think it was a real child and therefore I’m not guilty.’ which is deeply alarming.”
Sky News was granted rare access to the nerve center for the Ventura County cybercrime investigation team.
Inside an operation to combat cybercrime in Ventura County, California
Mr. Dobrosky, a district attorney investigator, shows me some of the message boards he is monitoring on the dark web.
“This guy here,” he says, pointing to the computer screen, “is called ‘I love little girls’… and his comment is about how the quality of AI is improving. Another person said they love how “AI has gotten better.” helped her addiction. And not as a way to overcome the addiction, but rather to feed it.”
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The creation and consumption of sexual images using artificial intelligence does not just happen on the dark web. In schools, there have been cases of children taking photos of their classmates on social media and using artificial intelligence to superimpose them on naked bodies.
At a school in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, five 13- and 14-year-olds did just that and were expelled while a police investigation was launched.
Students in US schools have even been using AI to generate images of their classmates being abused.
But in some states, such as California, it is not yet a crime to use AI to create images of child sexual abuse.
Ventura County Deputy District Attorney Rikole Kelly is trying to change that with a proposal to introduce a new law.
Ventura County Deputy Prosecutor Rikole Kelly Wants to Make Using AI to Generate Child Abuse Images a Specific Crime
“This is a technology that is so accessible that a high school student [10 to 14 years of age] “He’s able to use it in such a way that it can traumatize his teammates,” he says. “And that’s really concerning because it’s so accessible and in the wrong hands, it can cause irreparable harm.”
“We don’t want to desensitize the public to the sexual abuse of children,” he adds. “And that’s what this technology used in this way is capable of doing.”
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