Associated Incidents
A man in Quebec, Canada has been sentenced to three years in prison for using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate images of child pornography — the first ruling of its kind in the country.
Steven Larouche, 61, pleaded guilty to creating at least seven AI-generated deepfake videos of child porn, which superimpose the face of an individual onto the body of another person.
Larouche, from Sherbrooke, Quebec, also pleaded guilty to possessing hundreds of thousands of computer files of child pornography, for which he was sentenced to an additional four and a half years.
Canadian law bans any visual representation of someone depicted as being under the age of 18 engaged in explicit sexual activity.
The Canadian Press reports that in his ruling, provincial court judge Benoit Gagnon said he believed that this case was the first of its kind in Canada.
Gagnon voiced his concern that future criminals will use the same AI technology to put the faces of children whose images they find on social media onto videos of other children being sexually assaulted.
“The use of deepfake technology in criminal hands is chilling. The type of software allows crimes to be committed that could involve virtually every child in our communities,” Gagnon writes in his ruling that took place on April 14.
“A simple video excerpt of a child available on social media, or a video of children taken in a public place, could turn them into potential victims of child pornography.”
While Larouche’s lawyers argued for a lighter sentence, as children were not assaulted when he produced the videos, the judge wrote that the children whose bodies appeared in the videos had their sexual integrity violated again.
Many images of child pornography have a digital fingerprint, allowing police to identify them, the judge writes in his ruling. By creating the synthetic images, Larouche made it more difficult for police to stop the spread of illicit material.
In February, PetaPixel reported on a computer programmer who was arrested in Spain for creating child porn images with AI software. The arrest was allegedly the first of its kind in the country.
In the U.S., there is currently no federal legislation to protect against people’s images being used without their consent in deepfake porn or with any associated technology.