On August 3, Japan's National Police Agency announced that police nationwide during the first half of this year handled 123 cases of sexual deepfakes involving the manipulation of images of children under 18 using generative AI. According to Jiji Press, this figure is double the 60 cases recorded during the same period last year, and exceeds the total of 114 cases for the entire previous year. According to the National Police Agency, junior high school students accounted for the largest number of victims, with 79 cases. High school students accounted for 38 cases, elementary school students ...

An unemployed 31-year-old man has been arrested by Sapporo police for using a free generative AI tool to make obscene images of celebrities. Tatsuro Chiba allegedly trained the AI on images of actual women and then produced the pornographic content. He targeted some 300 celebrities, mainly female idols. Police seized a stash of 500,000 images from his computers, an undisclosed number of which were obscene. While we probably all have stuff on our computers meant for our private consumption, Chiba was actively pursuing ways to monetize his exploitation of the technology. In two years, he ...

In a first in Japan, four people have been arrested for making nude pictures of women using generative AI and then selling them online as posters. It is first such time in Japan that an arrest has been made for selling obscene materials made entirely using AI. (Though we have seen at least one arrest before for a man who used AI to decensor porn.) According to investigators, 44-year-old Tomohiro Mizutani and two other men and a 27-year-old woman sold such materials on multiple occasions via an online auction site in around October 2024. The materials were posters featuring printed versions ...