The pre-AI world is gone. Estimates suggest that already, as many as one in eight kids personally knows someone who has been the target of a deepfake photo or video, with numbers rising to one in four who have seen a sexualized deepfake of someone they recognize, either a friend or a celebrity. This is a real problem and it’s one that lawmakers are suddenly waking up to.
In the 1980s, when I was a kid, it was a picture of a missing child on a milk carton from across the country that encapsulated parental fears. In 2026, it’s an AI-generated suggestive image of a loved one.
The increasing availability of AI nudification tools, such as those associated with Grok, has fueled skyrocketing reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material — from roughly 4,700 in 2023 to over 440,000 in the first half of 2025 alone, according to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children.
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