India, Feb. 3 -- The dark side of Artificial Intelligence (AI) portends harm for children, a demography whose inchoate psychosocial and physiological development leaves them vulnerable even otherwise. AI tools have changed the way those preying on children operate, vastly reducing the time and effort involved in such vile activities and generating child sexual abuse material (CSAM) that can be traded. To illustrate, images of real-life child sex abuse victims are being fed into AI models to generate newer depictions from them, as reported by the United Kingdom (UK) based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in 2023.

AI tools are also being used to "de-age" celebrities with pictures collected from the internet. Predators have been found to use...