AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material Is Already Here
Real photos of real kids, turned into abuse imagery by AI. And AI glasses just made it worse.
IWF and the National Crime Agency just released a parent guide on AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, and honestly, it should be required reading right now.
Everyday family photos, the kind sitting in your camera roll or posted at a birthday party, are exactly what “nudifying” tools and deepfake generators work from. No hacking required. No dark web needed. Just a photo that already exists somewhere public.
This isn’t hypothetical, either. High schoolers are already doing this to each other with nothing more than a smartphone app, as I wrote about last year. One in eight teens knows someone directly targeted by deepfake nudes. This isn’t fringe behavior; it’s a classmate problem, happening in school hallways, not just on the dark web.
And this is where AI glasses change the calculus entirely. We’ve spent years teaching parents to think about what they post. Now the exposure point is what other people capture, in real time, without a child ever knowing a camera was on. Consent conversations built around “don’t overshare on social media” don’t cover a stranger’s smart glasses at a playground.
The guide’s practical: privacy settings, how to audit what’s already been shared by relatives, actual scripts for asking people to take a photo down without it turning into a fight. Worth the read for any parent, and for anyone building policy or product in this space.
Derek E. Baird, M.Ed., is a Child Rights & kidtech policy expert with over 20 years of experience building trust and safety systems for young people at organizations such as The Walt Disney Company, Facebook, BeMe Health, and Yahoo! He is the author of the best-selling book, The Gen Z Frequency.
