Source: themainemonitor.org 9/15/25
Across the country, 43 states have outlawed sexual deepfakes, and 28 banned AI-generated child sexual abuse material.
A Maine man went to watch a children’s soccer game. He snapped photos of kids playing. Then he went home and used artificial intelligence to take the otherwise innocuous pictures and turn them into sexually explicit images.
Police know who he is. But there is nothing they could do because the images are legal to have under state law, according to Maine State Police Lt. Jason Richards, who is in charge of the Computer Crimes Unit.
While child sexual abuse material has been illegal for decades under both federal and state law, the rapid development of generative AI — which uses models to create new content based on user prompts — means Maine’s definition of those images has lagged behind other states. Lawmakers here attempted to address the proliferating problem this year but took only a partial step.
“I’m very concerned that we have this out there, this new way of exploiting children, and we don’t yet have a protection for that,” Richards said.
Two years ago, it was easy to discern when a piece of material had been produced by AI, he said. It’s now hard to tell without extensive experience. In some instances, it can take a fully clothed picture of a child and make the child appear naked in an image known as a “deepfake.” People also train AI on child sexual abuse materials that are already online.
Nationally, the rise of AI-generated child sexual abuse material is a concern. At the end of last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children saw a 1,325% increase in the number of tips it received related to AI-generated materials. That material is becoming more commonly found when investigating cases of possession of child sexual abuse materials.
On Sept. 5, a former Maine state probation officer pleaded guilty to accessing with intent to view child sexual abuse materials in federal court. When federal investigators searched the man’s Kik account, they found he had sought out the content and had at least one image that was “AI-generated,” according to court documents.
The explicit material generated by AI has rapidly become intertwined with …