🚨 AI Is Generating Child Sexual Abuse Content

And IP Law Might Be the Only Thing That Can Stop It

Let’s talk about something uncomfortable.

AI-generated child sexual abuse content isn’t theoretical. It’s already out there—being created, traded, and fine-tuned with shockingly little friction.

You’d think it’s a criminal issue. And it is.

But it’s also an intellectual property crisis. A platform liability crisis.

A brand safety crisis.

And yes—a parenting crisis. Because a huge amount of this starts with people posting kids online.

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🧠 The Internet Trained the Model. But You Helped Train the Internet.

Here’s what we know:

• AI models have already been caught generating fake nudes of real children—based on scraped school photos, family YouTube videos, and public Instagram posts.

• Some models were fine-tuned on innocent pictures. Birthday parties. Soccer games. Yearbook portraits. All publicly posted.

• The law is catching up slowly—but meanwhile, this content is being generated and distributed using real kids’ faces, often without anyone noticing until it’s too late.

I’ve always been opposed to parents posting their minor children (who cannot consent to being posted) online.

But now in 2025, posting your child online is not neutral. It’s unpaid data labeling.

It’s no longer just dangerous. It’s exploitative.

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🧨 You Don’t Need to Be OpenAI to Be in the Blast Zone

Most of my clients aren’t building foundational models. They’re:

• Running platforms that let users upload or remix content

• Integrating AI tools into consumer-facing workflows

• Licensing IP, publishing creator content, or building brands

• Trying to protect themselves from the downstream chaos of generative tech

And guess what? That’s exactly where this gets risky.

Because here’s how the exposure chain works:

👩 A parent posts a photo of their kid on Instagram.

🤖 That photo gets scraped into a public dataset.

💻 A bad actor fine-tunes an open-source model on it.

😈 That model generates CSAM of the child.

📡 That content gets distributed via Discord, Telegram, or worse.

🧾 Law enforcement tries to trace it back.

🔗 The platform, host, or brand that touched any part of that image becomes a node in the liability chain.

You didn’t train the model.

You didn’t generate the image.

But if your platform facilitated it? Or your product hosted it? Or your brand’s ad agency used the wrong dataset?

You’re still legally—and morally—in play.

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🧠 This Isn’t Just Crime. It’s IP Theft. Of the Most Personal Kind.

A child’s face isn’t just a face. It’s biometric data.

And when someone scrapes, clones, or alters that data, it stops being a privacy violation and starts being an IP problem.

Here’s how you fight back—with the tools we already have:

• Right of publicity: Minors don’t need to be famous to have NIL. They’re entitled to control their name, image, and likeness—even if the law’s still catching up.

• Biometric privacy statutes: Illinois, California, and others give real teeth to claims involving facial data—especially if it’s stored, used, or profiled without consent.

• Copyright and derivative works: If a model uses a real image to generate a synthetic one—even if altered—that’s potentially an infringing derivative work.

• DMCA takedowns: If the source image is copyrighted (as most photos technically are), you can use civil IP law to force removal—even when criminal charges stall.

This is what IP law was built for: stopping unauthorized use, transformation, and monetization of content that someone else owns—especially when it causes harm.

And yes: a child’s likeness is content. And it should be protected like it.

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🔐 How to Protect Yourself and Your Product

Here’s what founders, platforms, and creators need to be doing right now:

✅ Lock down your photo strategy

If your site, blog, or content stack includes minors—even in a “wholesome” or lifestyle context—you need explicit parental consent. If you don’t have that, take it down.

✅ Classify kids’ images as high-risk IP

You already have internal tags for “sensitive data” or “regulated content.” Add a new one: minors. If you’re storing, serving, or syndicating it—treat it like hazardous material. Because legally? It is.

✅ Audit your vendors

Is your ad agency using Midjourney or open models to create social posts or thumbnails? Do you know where those images come from? Do they?

Spoiler: if you don’t ask, you don’t get to plead ignorance when it shows up in a takedown request.

✅ Add NIL terms to your contracts

Make it explicit: your contractors, partners, and creators cannot use AI-generated likenesses of real children—or fake ones that resemble real people. The ambiguity is the risk.

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🤬 The Ugly Truth: You Might Be the Data Source

Again, I’m extremely against posting children online. Full stop.

Not just because it’s unsafe.

Not just because it’s creepy.

But because it’s theft.

Minors cannot consent. They cannot opt out. They cannot license their NIL.

And yet every time a photo of them is posted—by a parent, a teacher, a brand—that face becomes one more node in a training set.

And when that face shows up in a sexual deepfake?

It’s not just tragic. It’s traceable.

And someone is going to get sued.

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🧠 Final Thought

If your platform, product, or photo policy allows public-facing images of kids—and you haven’t mapped that risk in the age of generative AI?

You are playing chicken with a legal system that is about to start swinging.

You don’t have to be OpenAI to be implicated.

You just have to be part of the pipeline.

And if that pipeline ends in child exploitation—even synthetic, even AI-generated—you’re not just morally implicated.

You’re legally exposed.

Fix it before that happens.

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