Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves

Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce.The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or “faked” in some way, including with AI and nudification tools.In the first six months of this year it received 420 reports from children of images of themselves that they believed had been faked or manipulated to appear explicit. The number has already exceeded its 2025 total of 397.Dan Sexton, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which operates Report Remove alongside the NSPCC children’s charity, said the figures underscored the difficulty of preventing online images from being manipulated in an age of widely available and capable AI tools.“If someone can take a benign image of a child from the internet and create Child Sexual Abuse Material with it, there is nothing that child can do to stop it from happening apart from preventing anyone from taking pictures of them – or not putting pictures of themselves online,” he said.Report Remove has received so many reports of manipulated images from under-18s in recent years that it has added a check box to its online submission form allowing them to flag the material as deepfaked.Sexton said the figures confirmed a fear that AI would improve in capability and be used to manipulate images of real people.“This is one of the harms we were worried about when we first saw AI image generators being used, that they would be used to create Child Sexual Abuse Material featuring real children,” he said.“Everyone in the world is at risk,” Sexton added.Dan Sexton, the chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation, said it was becoming easier to manipulate benign images of children. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianThe IWF, which monitors the distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material [CSAM] online, said the majority of the reports of manipulated images made to Report Remove in 2025 and 2026 were so severe that they passed the CSAM threshold. AI-generated CSAM is illegal in the UK and the government has made it illegal to adapt an AI model to create abuse material or to distribute such models to others.Rani Govender, an online safety expert at the NSPCC, said tech companies must put stronger safety protections in their AI products to prevent the creation of explicit material.“This rise in children reaching out because fake or AI‑generated sexual images have been created of them is alarming but also sadly predictable,” she said. “Tech companies cannot keep pushing out AI products without embedding strong protections that prevent this material from being created in the first place.”Sexton said some victims who had contacted Report Remove about manipulated images had been targeted for sextortion, where a blackmailer threatens to publish the material unless they receive financial payment or demands more explicit images from the victim.Report Remove is a service that allows children to anonymously flag intimate images or videos of themselves that have been sent to former partners, sextortion fraudsters or could appear online. The service turns those images into a “hash”, or digital fingerprint, which is shared with major tech platforms, which can take the image down or prevent it from being uploaded.The rise of AI-enabled deepfakes has prompted a series of warnings about posting identifiable pictures of children online.Last month the National Crime Agency and IWF encouraged parents and guardians to keep pictures of their children away from public display online. They suggested making social media accounts private or sharing pictures of children through a “close friends” group only.The guidance also followed cases in which cybercriminals had attempted to blackmail schools by scraping pictures of children, using AI to convert them into Child Sexual Abuse Material, then threatening to publish the imagery. Schools have been urged to remove identifiable pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts.