DAN (Do Anything Now) · The Guardian Technology
Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves
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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.
Key facts
- The IWF, which monitors the distribution of child sexual abuse material [CSAM] online, said most the reports of manipulated images made to Report Remove in 2025 and 2026 were so severe that they
- 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
- Last month the National Crime Agency and IWF encouraged parents and guardians to keep pictures of their children away from public display online
- Rani Govender, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, said tech companies must put stronger safety protections in their AI products to prevent the creation of explicit material
Summary
The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate. 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. 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. “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.