<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/08/uk-children-explicit-deepfake-images-ai>
"Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring
their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier
to produce.
The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online,
said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally
manipulated or “faked” in some way, including with AI and nudification tools.
In the first six months of this year it received 420 reports from children of
images of themselves that they believed had been faked or manipulated to appear
explicit. The number has already exceeded its 2025 total of 397.
Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF),
which operates Report Remove alongside the NSPCC children’s charity, said the
figures underscored the difficulty of preventing online images from being
manipulated in an age of widely available and capable AI tools.
“If someone can take a benign image of a child from the internet and create
child sexual abuse material with it, there is nothing that child can do to stop
it from happening apart from preventing anyone from taking pictures of them –
or not putting pictures of themselves online,” he said.
Report Remove has received so many reports of manipulated images from under-18s
in recent years that it has added a check box to its online submission form
allowing them to flag the material as deepfaked.
Sexton said the figures confirmed a fear that AI would improve in capability
and be used to manipulate images of real people.
“This is one of the harms we were worried about when we first saw AI image
generators being used, that they would be used to create child sexual abuse
material featuring real children,” he said.
“Everyone in the world is at risk,” Sexton added."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
