Child sexual abuse takes many forms. It can occur in the home,
online, or in institutions and has a life-long impact on the
victim. WeProtect Global Alliance’s 2023 Global Threat Assessment
finds that child sexual abuse and exploitation online is
escalating worldwide, in both scale and methods. As the online
world is borderless, we must work as an international community
to tackle this horrific crime.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents enormous opportunities to
help tackle the threat of online child sexual abuse. It has the
potential to transform and enhance the ability of industry and
law enforcement to detect child sexual abuse cases. To realise
this, we affirm that we must develop AI in a way that is for the
common good of protecting children from sexual abuse across all
nations.
Alongside these opportunities, AI also poses significant risks to
our efforts to tackle the proliferation of child sexual abuse
material and prevent the grooming of children. AI tools can be
utilised by child sexual offenders to create child sexual abuse
material, thereby leading to an epidemic in the proliferation of
this material. Data from the Internet Watch Foundation found that
in just one dark web forum, over a one-month period, 11,108 AI
generated images had been shared, and the IWF were able to
confirm 2,978 of these depicted AI generated child sexual abuse
material. The increase in the creation and proliferation of
AI-generated child sexual abuse material poses significant risks
to fuelling the normalisation of offending behaviour and to law
enforcement’s ability around the world to identify children who
need safeguarding. In addition, AI can also enable grooming
interactions, scripting sexual extortive interactions with
children. Whilst these technologies are evolving at an
exponential rate, the safety of our children cannot be an
afterthought, and we must all work in collaboration to make sure
these technologies have robust measures in place.
Issues in tackling child sexual abuse arising from AI are
inherently international in nature, and so action to address them
requires international cooperation. We resolve to work together
to ensure that we utilise responsible AI for tackling the threat
of child sexual abuse and commit to continue to work
collaboratively to ensure the risks posed by AI to tackling child
sexual abuse do not become insurmountable. We will seek to
understand and, as appropriate, act on the risks arising from AI
to tackling child sexual abuse through existing fora.
All actors have a role to play in ensuring the safety of children
from the risks of frontier AI. We note that companies developing
frontier AI capabilities have a particularly strong
responsibility for ensuring the safety of these capabilities. We
encourage all relevant actors to provide transparency on their
plans to measure, monitor and mitigate the capabilities which may
be exploited by child sexual offenders. At a country level, we
will seek to build respective policies across our countries to
ensure safety in light of the child sexual abuse risks.
We affirm that the safe development of AI will enable the
transformative opportunities of AI to be used for good to tackle
child sexual abuse and support partners in their quest to
prioritise and streamline their processes.
As part of wider international cooperation, we resolve to sustain
the dialogue and technical innovation around tackling child
sexual abuse in the age of AI.
Co-signatories
