Artificial intelligence (AI) is opening new frontiers in the problems of bullying and child pornography. Parents, schools, and legislators all have an important role to play in mitigating the new risks.
Ieva, a mother from Vilnius, says that pornographic content is easily accessible to children from an early age, and the problem is becoming increasingly worse.
“It’s scary to take your child to school because someone may show pornographic pictures to a primary school child. Once my five-year-old daughter sat next to older girls at a train station. I look at their mobile phones and I see them downloading and sharing pornographic gifs with each other. Sex acts, naked people are clearly visible. And my daughter is sitting next to me. It’s scary when children don’t have a sense of responsibility and don’t understand the consequences of this,” says Ieva.
Eglė Tamulionytė, coordinator of the Children’s Line campaign No to Bullying, agrees that pornography generated by AI is also used for bullying.
“For example, ‘undressing’ photos with apps. A photo of a child can be taken from a social network and processed with a special app to generate a very realistic photo of a naked body. These are then distributed among kids in school or uploaded to the internet. We have been hearing about this for a couple of years now, especially from helplines in other countries,” says Tamulionytė.
There are other AI-linked threats for children, says Renata Gaudinskaitė, founder of the Centre for Digital Ethics. AI makes it easy to generate fake videos, automate bullying and collect children’s personal data.
“In recent years, we have seen an alarming and growing trend, with even young children falling victim to cyber criminals,” she says. “Content created with artificial intelligence tools is one of the fastest growing threats, with cases of AI being used to create highly realistic photos of children all over the world.”
According to Gaudinskaitė, everyone has to take responsibility, including developers, users and governments that must create and enforce clear rules.
“Let’s start by understanding the scale of the problem. We need both a clear legislative framework and active public education at the national level – we underestimate the risks on the internet, and there is a lack of critical thinking and educating the parents about how to prevent minors from being exposed to social networks where the age limit is 13,” she says.
Parents should take a more active role in educating and protecting their children from online threats, believes Edita Žiobienė, the ombudswoman for the Protection of the Rights of the Child.
However, Childline’s Tamulionytė believes that while parents play a very important role, they cannot always keep pace with technology.
“Technology is always ahead of the curve, it’s really hard to be aware of all the innovations and recognise the dangers,” she says. “I see a lot of astonishment among adults about the role of AI in bullying.”
In the case of cyber-bullying, children often have little confidence that adults can help, she adds. “They fear that instead of real help, they will simply be banned from the internet, that adults won’t understand the technology, or that they won’t have the tools to help,” says Tamulionytė.
Ieva, a mother from Vilnius, says that although she talks to her children about the dangers online, the most important step would be to further restrict access to pornographic content.
“It’s not enough to ask if you’re 18,” she says. “Like adults in a bank, perhaps children could show their ID, which would make it more difficult.
“Many people don’t believe in restrictions and say that a child will log in with their parents’ details if they really want to, but I think there would be at least a minimum barrier to climb. After all, it only takes a few seconds to see a photo or a video and the imprint lasts a lifetime.”
Tomas Krilavičius, dean of the Faculty of Information Technology at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, says technology will present big changes in the future so it is important to keep society on top of things.
“Text, sound and image generation are on the rise, and we can certainly see that the impact will be enormous, but the threats of artificial intelligence cannot be solved by technical safeguards alone, just like any other bad thing. This is where society’s attitude needs to change and become more critical,” says Krilavičius.
Legislation is slowly catching up to the new threats posed by AI, he adds. The Ombudswoman for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, Žiobienė, also stresses the need to keep the laws up to date.
“With every new thing that comes along, we need to start thinking about what we could change and do differently in law,” says the ombudswoman.
According to the Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau, the number of cybercrimes is growing every year, with 272 cyber-related crimes reported in 2024, up from 227 in 2023.
The Bureau says that it does not currently collect statistics on cybercrime that involve AI.
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
