The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that it is legal to possess sexualized child abuse material (called child pornography) that was created using artificial intelligence (AI). As Fox News notes, Judge John Lee noted that the content is currently covered by the 2002 US Supreme Court decision that there is no liability for possession of erotic illustrations of fictitious minors, but called on his colleagues to return to this issue.
Lee's decision came in the case of Steven Anderegg, who was previously cleared of possession of AI child porn by a lower court in Wisconsin, citing the same precedent.
The programmer was arrested in 2024 in connection with the discovery of thousands of realistic erotic images of children generated by the Stable Diffusion neural network, which he also sent to minors on social networks. He continues to be tried for creating and distributing child porn; the man faces dozens of years in prison.
“The Supreme Court in Free Speech Coalition outlined the limits of First Amendment protection for virtual child sex abuse material, but that was nearly 25 years ago, and the image generation capabilities available today were unimaginable then,” Lee said in the decision.
The judge added that he was “troubled by the lines drawn by these cases,” but had no ability to “redraw them” himself without intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The decision also noted the concern that banned material featuring real children could end up in AI training databases, as previously reported in academic research. According to Lee and his colleague Joshua Kolar, who joined the verdict, this circumstance may contradict the 2002 Supreme Court decision, since it dealt exclusively with fictional cartoon characters.
In this regard, the judges emphasized that their verdict does not apply to child porn generated by AI by modifying images of real children. Its storage does not fall under the 2002 precedent.
As RTVI previously reported, in July, a US resident, whose stepfather was arrested for creating 7,000 pornographic photos and videos with her participation using the Grok neural network, joined a class action lawsuit against Elon Musk’s AI company xAI. The content was generated based on an image of her at age 11. The man committed suicide during the investigation.
