WASHINGTON — US federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material.

The US Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children.

"There's more to come," said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases.

"What we're concerned about is the normalisation of this," Silver said in an interview. "AI makes it easier to generate these kinds of images, and the more that are out there, the more normalised this becomes. That's something that we really want to stymie and get in front of."

The rise of generative AI has sparked concerns at the Justice Department that the rapidly advancing technology will be used to carry out cyberattacks, boost the sophistication of cryptocurrency scammers and undermine election security.

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