There’s growing concern about the prevalence of artificial intelligence being used to doctor photos of children for sinister means.
Holly Brooker, co-founder of Makes Sense, said pictures of children being turned into abusive material is something the New Zealand Police have increasingly been alerting the public about.
“It’s an emerging trend that’s growing rapidly,” she told Breakfast.
“The Internet Watch Foundation reported recently that there’s been a 380% increase in AI-generated child abuse material in the last year.”
Brooker said schools could be more front-footed in tackling the increasing risk.
“I don’t think that it’s something that all schools have thought about and considered well.”
She said the Privacy Commission provided guidelines in May this year about the sharing of images and videos involving children.
“What I’d love to see is schools adopt really robust policies about ‘how are we going to share these images, what are the risks?’, really tighten things up a bit.
“We come from an era in the early days of Facebook where we weren’t worried about these types of things. With tech, things have escalated quite quickly.”
Brooker added it was important to be mindful about where people are posting their children’s images online, suggesting private messaging threads were the safer option.
