Symposium on Combatting AI Child Porn Online Held in Tokyo; International NPOs Asking for Japanese Cooperation

The Yomiuri Shimbun

1:00 JST, April 11, 2024

A symposium to discuss how to combat the spread of AI-generated sexual images of children on the internet was held in Tokyo on Tuesday.

The representative of the Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Britain, which deletes such images, called for international cooperation in regards to its work. The NPO acts under certification from British investigative authorities.

Major Western countries legally restrict AI-generated sexual images of children. But in Japan, AI-generated images are, in principle, not covered by legal restrictions, because laws prohibiting child prostitution and child porn is applied on the condition that they depict children who actually exist.

It has been confirmed that there are multiple websites in Japan on which these kinds of graphic images are posted.

Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the NPO delivered a lecture at the symposium, and reported that more than 2,000 AI-generated graphic images depicting child porn were found in a month on dark websites, which are illegal in Britain.