Police pitch ways for parents to help keep kids safe as AI porn threat grows

CALGARY – As more children and youth find fake, AI-generated pornographic photos of them circulated online, one investigator says to stay safe, lock it down.

Staff Sgt. Mark Auger, with Alberta’s Internet Child Exploitation team, urges parents to remind kids to use settings to keep social media profiles private while restricting virtual friends and followers to those people users know.

Otherwise, Auger said, publicly available images can be taken and manipulated.

“As soon as you accept them as a friend or contact or a connection, you’re letting them into your house,” said Auger in an interview.

Last week, Auger’s unit charged a 17-year-old boy with multiple offences, including making and distributing child sexual abuse and exploitation materials.

Police allege he used AI to create sexualized photos of teen girls from different Calgary high schools. He was alleged to have shared the material on social media.

Police did not name the victims, the schools they attended or any known connection to the accused. The identities of the victims and the accused are protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

The accused was caught with help from Calgary police.

Auger said to also avoid moving chat platforms when talking with someone, as they could be shifting to encrypted platforms that may not have robust reporting processes.

Safer online practices can help, but for policing agencies, Auger said keeping up with the technology is a near-impossible footrace.

“It’s not just in this very narrow offence group, it’s across the board: the AI capabilities and uses are growing faster than we can keep up, faster than we can monitor and faster than they can be regulated,” said Auger.

The case in Calgary is one of several in Canada of a teenager using artificial intelligence to create sexualized images of other high school students.

In some other similar cases, like in Winnipeg and Guelph, Ont., the accused were never charged.

A report from the Internet Watch Foundation, an organization that works to remove online child sexual abuse material, says the number of AI-generated videos it found online rose from two in the first half of 2024 to nearly 1,300 in the same time period in 2025.

As the cases grow, questions arise about how best to charge offenders and deal with them in court.

Auger said charges can vary by police discretion, such as whether the material was used for extortion. “When it’s weaponized and used to hurt another person, that’s where it goes to a chargeable offence,” he said.

Lara Karaian, with the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University, says while there needs to be accountability for perpetrators, when it comes to the courts the response should fit the crime.

Karaian says courts should consider whether child sex abuse laws are too extreme of a response for AI-porn cases involving youth.

“Even though deepfake porns are of a non-consensual nature, they’re not the same thing as sexual violations that have then been recorded and then distributed non-consensually,” Karaian said in an interview.

She compared the relatively novel use of AI-generated sexual material to the emergence of sexting. In 2015, new federal rules kicked in criminalizing non-consensual distribution of sexual images – commonly known as “revenge porn” – to create another avenue for courts to consider when minors shared intimate images.

That legislation, Karaian said, could be used to charge teens involved in AI-porn crimes as well. 

She said charging minors with sexual abuse crimes may be too blunt a tool for an AI offence, given that it carries severe penalties like registration on the sex offender list and compliance with a DNA bank order.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 9, 2025.