A Disney child star has been left devastated after finding out that AI was used to make indecent images of her.
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Kaylin Hayman, best known for her role in Just Roll With It on Disney Channel TV, was shocked when she received a call from the FBI notifying her of a harrowing incident taking place thousands of miles away from her.
A man was using artificial intelligence to conjure up indecent images of the 16-year-old as well as other children, using their faces on images of adults performing sexual acts.
Kaylin couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"I broke down in tears when I heard," she said to Sky News in an interview. "It feels like such an invasion of my privacy. It doesn't feel real that someone I don't know could see me in such a manner."
She continued: "My innocence was just stripped away from me in that moment. In those images, I was a 12-year-old girl and so it was heartbreaking, to say the least. I felt so lonely because I didn't know this was actually a crime that was going on in the world."
AI-related sexual crimes, especially against children, have been on the rise and as technology gets more advanced, investigators around the world are having a more difficult time figuring out which images have been forged from which ones contain real victims.
Terry Dobrosky, a specialist in cyber crimes in Ventura County, California told the outlet that this type of content is now so "lifelike."
"The material that's being produced by AI now is so lifelike it's disturbing," he says. "Someone may be able to claim in court, 'oh, I believed that that was actually AI-generated. I didn't think it was a real child and therefore I'm not guilty.' It's eroding our actual laws as they stand now, which is deeply alarming."
And you would think that this type of content is reserved for the more disturbing parts of our society like the dark web, but it's not.
Instead, AI has also been used as a method of sharing revenge p*rn or bullying within classrooms, workplaces, as well as other establishments.
The issue is that only a handful of places actually refer to this as a crime, so in some places, people are able to produce and/or distribute this type of content and not be punished.
Rikole Kelly, deputy district attorney for Ventura County, is trying to change that, with a proposal to introduce a new law in California where this is currently not illegal.
"This is technology that is so accessible that a middle schooler [10 to 14 years of age] is capable of utilizing it in a way that they can traumatize their peers," she stated. "And that's really concerning because this is so accessible and in the wrong hands, it can cause irreparable damage.
"We don't want to desensitize the public to the sexual abuse of children, and that's what this technology used in this way is capable of doing," she added.
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