He is accused of 20 counts of obscenity.
Florida Man
A Florida man faces 20 counts of obscenity charges for using artificial intelligence to create and distribute child pornography, underscoring the danger and pervasiveness of using generative artificial intelligence for nefarious purposes.
According to a television station, Phillip Michael McCorkle was arrested last week while working at a movie theater in Vero Beach, Florida CBS 12 NewsA television crew filmed the arrest, and dramatic video footage emerged as police led the uniformed McCorkle out of the cinema in handcuffs.
The investigation began after the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office received tips that McCorkle was using a synthetic image generator to create sexually explicit images of children and distribute them through the social media app Kik.
McCorkle’s arrest was part of a county operation to catch people in possession of child pornography, but the use of generative AI in this particular arrest shows how technology is creating new avenues for crime and child abuse.
What protective measures
The increasing flood of artificial intelligence-generated child sexual abuse images has prompted federal, state and local lawmakers to push through laws criminalizing this type of pornography, but it is unclear how effectively it can be stopped.
Last year, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 4,700 reports of child pornography created using generative AI. Some criminals even used generative AI to create deepfakes of real children and blackmail them.
A 2023 Stanford University study also found that hundreds of images of child sexual abuse were found in widely used generative AI image datasets.
When you put it all together, you have a seemingly uncontrollable problem.
“We believe the content we saw was actually created using open source software that was downloaded and run locally on users’ computers and then modified,” said Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation. The Guardian last year. “And this problem is much more difficult to solve.”
More on AI porn: Experts warn: perpetrators use AI to create “really nasty” images of child sexual abuse
