The use of AI for sexualizing minors garnered a staunch criticism from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Wednesday. Calling for a ban from international governments on such exploitation of AI against minors, the misuse of AI tools to generate fabricated nudes of minors is becoming an alarming issue that needs serious attention on an urgent basis.
The statement from UNICEF comes after Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok recently landed in trouble for generating inappropriate images of children as part of search results.
Following a public outcry, UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has opened an investigation on Grok. Additionally, the Europol and the French Gendarmerie nationale raided Musk’s Paris offices on Wednesday with the French prosecutors opening probe on Grok’s incorrect algorithm, generation of deepfakes, and pornographic illustrations of minors.
UNICEF has now joined the UK and France in addressing the situation.
“All governments expand definitions of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to include AI-generated content, and criminalise its creation, procurement, possession and distribution. The harm from deepfake abuse is real and urgent. Children cannot wait for the law to catch up,” the UN agency established in 1946 said in its statement.
Citing a study it collaborated with the InterPol on, UNICEF claimed that in the last one year at least 1.2 million children disclosed having had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes. ECPAT, the cluster of international children welfare organizations headquartered in Thailand also worked on this study.
The New York City-based UN agency has pushed AI companies to strengthen content moderation with investment in detection technologies.
“AI developers implement safety-by-design approaches and robust guardrails to prevent misuse of AI models,” its statement said.
Grok is the AI chatbot created by Musk’s AI firm xAI. The generative AI feature is integrated within X and also offers access via a standalone app.
Several media reports have cited data by the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) agency that estimates that Grok generated three million non-consensual sexualized images of women and children in the last few weeks to prompts like “put in a bikini”, before the matter erupted. A similar image of UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer also reportedly made the rounds on social media.
Earlier in January, Musk reportedly said the Grok debacle is an excuse for censorship.