JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Today, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey joined a bipartisan 54-state and territory coalition urging Congress to study how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to exploit children through child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). The states call on Congress to draft legislation safeguarding children from such abuses.
“As Attorney General, I will always work to make Missouri the safest state in the nation for children,” said Attorney General Bailey. “If there’s anything we’ve discovered in our federal censorship lawsuit, it’s that these Big Tech companies do not have Americans’ best interests at heart. Suicide rates have skyrocketed over the last decade because Big Tech didn’t take the necessary steps to protect children from the harmful effects of social media. We cannot let AI hurt our children as well. Congress must act.”
The dangers of AI as it relates to CSAM is in three main categories: (1) a real child’s likeness who has not been physically abused being digitally altered in a depiction of abuse, (2) a real child who has been physically abused being digitally recreated in other depictions of abuse, and (3) a child who does not even exist being digitally created in a depiction of abuse that feeds the market for CSAM.
In the letter, Attorney General Bailey and the coalition urged Congress to form a commission to study how AI can be used to exploit children and to “act to deter and address child exploitation, such as by expanding existing restrictions on CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated CSAM.”
Attorney General Bailey was joined in sending the letter by Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia. Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Virgin Islands, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.