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AI incident: sexual content (Stable Diffusion, Mar 2024)

4 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Stable Diffusion and Stability Ai and deployed by Steven Anderegg allegedly harmed Minors and General Public.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
Occurred
Coverage
4 reportsMay 2024

What happened

The FBI has arrested Steven Anderegg of Holmen, Wisconsin for having allegedly used Stable Diffusion to generate about 13,000 sexually explicit images of minors, which he then is also alleged to have shared and distributed, including with at least one minor, via Telegram and Instagram. Anderegg was originally apprehended by state police in March, and this case marks one of the first times the FBI has brought charges against someone for having used AI to generate CSAM.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (4)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. FBI Arrests Man For Generating AI Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
    404media.co · Samantha Cole
  2. Man Arrested for Producing, Distributing, and Possessing AI-Generated Images of Minors Engaged in Sexually Explicit Conduct
    justice.gov · Department of Justice
  3. In novel case, U.S. charges man with making child sex abuse images with AI
    washingtonpost.com · Pranshu Verma, Drew Harwell
  4. US man used AI to generate 13,000 child sexual abuse pictures, FBI alleges
    theguardian.com · Nick Robins-Early

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Steven Anderegg
Alleged harmed party
Minors, General Public

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.3.

  • Cheating/plagiarism

    "Cheating/plagiarism - Use of another person’s or group’s words or ideas without consent and/or acknowledgement."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • IP/copyright loss

    "IP/copyright loss - Misuse or abuse of an individual or organisation’s intellectual property, including copyright, trademarks, and patents."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Financial and business

    "Financial and Business - Use or misuse of a technology system in a manner that damages the financial interests of an individual or group, or which causes strategic, operational, legal or financial harm to a business or...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Impersonation/identity theft

    "Impersonation/identity theft - Theft of an individual, group or organisation’s identity by a third-party in order to defraud, mock or otherwise harm them."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Dehumanisation/objectification

    "Dehumanisation/objectification - Use or misuse of a technology system to depict and/or treat people as not human, less than human, or as objects."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Defamation/libel/slander

    "Defamation/libel/slander - Use of a technology system to create, facilitate or amplify false perception(s) about an individual, group, or organisation."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Misinformation and Manipulation

    "Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be exploited to craft deceptive narratives with levels of persuasiveness similar to human-generated content (Pan et al., 2023b; Spitale et al., 2023), to fabri- cate fake n...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Cybersecurity

    "LLMs may exacerbate cybersecurity risks in various ways (Newman, 2024). Firstly, LLMs may significantly amplify the effectiveness of deceptive operations aimed at tricking people into disclosing sensitive information or...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #689 on the AI Incident Database · all 4 reports