Child actor Kaylin Hayman fought back after she learned that a man had used AI to make child sex abuse materials from images on her Instagram page Last year, Kaylin Hayman walked into a Pittsburgh court to testify against a man she’d never met who had used her face to make pornographic pictures with artificial intelligence technology. Kaylin, 16, is a child actress who starred in the Disney show Just Roll With It from 2019 to 2021. The perpetrator, a 57-year-old man named James Smelko, had targeted her because of her public profile. She is one of about 40 of his victims, all of them child actors. In one of the images of Kaylin submitted into evidence at the trial, Smelko used her face from a photo posted on Instagram when she was 12, working on set, and superimposed it onto the naked body of someone else. Continue reading...

National police agency says it is investigating 513 cases of deepfake pornography as a new scandal grips the country The anger was palpable. For the second time in just a few years, South Korean women took to the streets of Seoul to demand an end to sexual abuse. When the country spearheaded Asia’s #MeToo movement, the culprit was molka – spy cams used to record women without their knowledge. Now their fury was directed at an epidemic of deepfake pornography. For Juhee Jin, 26, a Seoul resident who advocates for women’s rights, the emergence of this new menace, in which women and girls are again the targets, was depressingly predictable. “This should have been addressed a long time ago,” says Jin, a translator. “I hope that authorities take precautions and provide proper education so that people can prevent these crimes from happening.” Continue reading...

Counsellors are receiving an increasing number of calls from young people being blackmailed over faked indecent images * National Crime Agency threatens extraditions over rise in sextortion cases * How west Africa’s online fraudsters moved into sextortion It was a phone call that has become all too common for Childline counsellors in recent months. The 17-year-old boy said he was scared and did not know what to do. He had been contacted by a “girl” on social media claiming to be his own age and, after an exchange of messages, had sent her an intimate image. And then the blackmail demands started. Continue reading...