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Repercussions come for AI-generated child porn

May 28, 2024

Scott Nover

Gavel in a courtroom

REUTERS

This month, the US Department of Justice charged a 42-year-old Wisconsin man named Steven Anderegg with alleged crimes related to creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography. If convicted of all four counts brought by federal prosecutors, Anderegg faces up to 70 years in prison.

The case is novel. It’s the first time that the federal government has brought charges for child porn fully generated by AI. The government said that Anderegg created a trove of 13,000 fake images using the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, made by the company Stability AI, along with certain add-ons to the technology. This isn’t the first blow-up involving Stable Diffusion, though. In December, Stanford University researchers found that the dataset LAION-5B, used by Stable Diffusion, included 1,679 illegal images of child sexual abuse material.

This case could set a new precedent for an open question: Is AI-generated child pornography — for all intents and purposes under the law — child pornography?

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People gather after Friday prayers during a protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, in Amman, Jordan, on April 4, 2025.

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Jordanian authorities announced on Wednesday the arrest of 16 people accused of planning terrorist attacks inside Jordan. The country’s security services say the suspects had been under surveillance since 2021, and half a dozen of them were reportedly members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist organization.

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Repercussions come for AI-generated child porn

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Repercussions come for AI-generated child porn

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A federal judge set up a showdown with the Trump administration on Wednesday with a ruling that threatens to find the government in contempt if it fails to comply with a judicial order to provide due process to Venezuelans deported to a prison in El Salvador.

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