6 days ago
How Argentina's AI ruling can help stem child sexual exploitation
Creating child abuse imagery with artificial intelligence is a crime in Argentina after a landmark high court ruling in the South American nation during a surge of child sexual abuse content available online.
A high court in Argentina's Buenos Aires province ruled this month that the use of AI-generated child abuse photos and videos is a criminal offence even if no real, identifiable victims are involved and regardless of whether the images were completely or partially fabricated by AI.
'It's an unprecedented ruling in Latin America,' said lawyer Hernan Navarro, founder of Grooming Argentina, a non-profit organisation tackling child grooming.
'While these are crimes where there is effectively no apparent victim, what is interpreted is that society as a whole is the victim,' said Navarro, an expert in paedophile crimes.
The ruling stemmed from the case of a man accused of publishing and distributing AI-generated images and videos of children aged between three and 13 performing sexual acts.
While judges acknowledged the imagery could not be traced to real children, they said failing to criminalise AI-generated content would 'lead to the normalisation' of paedophilia and harm the 'sexual integrity' of children.
The court ruling directly addresses the legal vacuum surrounding AI-generated illicit content, and campaigners said they hope the legal precedent will help fight online child exploitation and the misuse of AI tools.
'In the hands of paedophiles, AI technology can be a weapon as it becomes a readily available tool to fabricate blackmail material,' said Navarro.
The use of technology allows the doctoring of images of children that originally had no sexual connotation, undressing them or altering them to create sexualised content.
This can be used to threaten or blackmail the victim with its publication, Navarro said.
