There you have it! I have three little girls, ages 6, 6 and 7, and this story scares me more than…
October 5, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
AI
There you have it! I have three little girls, ages 6, 6 and 7, and this story scares me more than almost anything I've read this year.
The Internet Watch Foundation assessed 6,310 AI-generated child abuse images in the first half of 2026 alone, which is already about 40% more than all of 2025 combined.
It's not all invented faces, either. Report Remove, the UK service that helps kids get intimate images taken down, logged 420 reports from children who believe their own photos were altered with AI or "nudify" apps in the first six months of this year, compared to 397 for the whole of 2025. A birthday party photo or a school recital video that a parent posted in good faith can become the raw material, and the kid finds out when someone sends it to them. I've posted photos of my girls over the years like every other parent, and I honestly feel sick thinking about that now.
Then last month the Seventh Circuit ruled that privately possessing AI-generated abuse imagery of virtual children, material that stays inside the home and is never shared, is protected under current First Amendment precedent. I want to be careful here because this ruling is narrow: it does not touch anyone who makes, shares, sells or distributes this material, the defendant still faces production and distribution charges, and the judge wrote that the court is bound by a 2002 Supreme Court case (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition) that was decided two decades before generative AI existed. Judge Lee even said "we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves."
So the court did its job, and judges following precedent instead of legislating from the bench is how it's supposed to work. That puts it on Congress, and so far there is no bill addressing this gap in the US and no scheduled AI bill in the UK either. The law was written for a world where producing this kind of material required hurting a real child, and AI broke that assumption, so it has to be rewritten by the people we elect to rewrite it. As a parent I don't care which party gets it done, I just want it done.
In the meantime, the National Crime Agency and the IWF are telling parents to keep their kids' photos off public social media, or at least lock the accounts to private and limit them to a small circle of people you actually know. I'm taking that advice and tightening what I share about my girls, and if you have kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews, I'd ask you to do the same this week.
Full breakdown on UnbiasedHeadlines.com, an unbiased news site built entirely by AI agents. No spin, just the facts: https://lnkd.in/eCf8zVcb
The Internet Watch Foundation assessed 6,310 AI-generated child abuse images in the first half of 2026 alone, which is already about 40% more than all of 2025 combined.
It's not all invented faces, either. Report Remove, the UK service that helps kids get intimate images taken down, logged 420 reports from children who believe their own photos were altered with AI or "nudify" apps in the first six months of this year, compared to 397 for the whole of 2025. A birthday party photo or a school recital video that a parent posted in good faith can become the raw material, and the kid finds out when someone sends it to them. I've posted photos of my girls over the years like every other parent, and I honestly feel sick thinking about that now.
Then last month the Seventh Circuit ruled that privately possessing AI-generated abuse imagery of virtual children, material that stays inside the home and is never shared, is protected under current First Amendment precedent. I want to be careful here because this ruling is narrow: it does not touch anyone who makes, shares, sells or distributes this material, the defendant still faces production and distribution charges, and the judge wrote that the court is bound by a 2002 Supreme Court case (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition) that was decided two decades before generative AI existed. Judge Lee even said "we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves."
So the court did its job, and judges following precedent instead of legislating from the bench is how it's supposed to work. That puts it on Congress, and so far there is no bill addressing this gap in the US and no scheduled AI bill in the UK either. The law was written for a world where producing this kind of material required hurting a real child, and AI broke that assumption, so it has to be rewritten by the people we elect to rewrite it. As a parent I don't care which party gets it done, I just want it done.
In the meantime, the National Crime Agency and the IWF are telling parents to keep their kids' photos off public social media, or at least lock the accounts to private and limit them to a small circle of people you actually know. I'm taking that advice and tightening what I share about my girls, and if you have kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews, I'd ask you to do the same this week.
Full breakdown on UnbiasedHeadlines.com, an unbiased news site built entirely by AI agents. No spin, just the facts: https://lnkd.in/eCf8zVcb