UK: Sex offender banned from using AI tools for five years
In a landmark judgement, a British court has banned a convicted sex offender from using AI generators for five years as part of his sentence.
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In the UK, a sex offender will not be allowed to use an AI generator for five years after his conviction. The Guardian reports this, adding that the decision was made in February "by a UK court". The man was convicted of creating over 1,000 "inappropriate" images of children, for which he also had to pay a fine of 200 pounds (around 230 euros). He was also banned from using or visiting AI tools without prior authorisation from the police. Stable distribution was explicitly mentioned. This is the first known case of its kind.
More and more AI-generated depictions of child abuse
The ban is intended to prevent sexual abuse from occurring, writes the London-based newspaper. There are no further details about the case. The public prosecutor's office responsible for Wales and England has also stated that it is not unusual to ask courts to prohibit the use of certain technology. This is the case, for example, if it is assumed that there is a persistent risk to the safety of children. So far, however, this has mainly involved bans on using incognito mode in the browser or deleting the browser history. In the specific case, it is not known whether AI tools were already used in the punished offenses or whether there were merely concerns about this in the future, writes the Guardian.
The sentence for the convicted man was imposed against the backdrop of a rapid increase in AI-generated images of child abuse. Such images threaten to flood the internet, a British child protection organization warned in the autumn. Some of the images look so realistic that even trained experts would no longer be able to tell the difference between them and real photos and they would have to be treated as real images under British law. The "worst nightmares" would become reality because new images would be created from photos of real victims of child abuse with the help of AI. No less worrying are deepfakes, i.e. fake naked pictures of real people. Their creation is to be made a punishable offense- this already applies to their distribution.
(mho)