British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper appears on BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg in London, Britain on February 2, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Britain will become the first country to introduce laws against AI tools used to generate sexual abuse images, the government announced late on Saturday (February 1, 2025).

The government will make it illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools designed to generate sexualised images of children, punishable by up to five years in prison, Interior Minister Yvette Cooper revealed.

It will also be illegal to possess AI “paedophile manuals” which teach people how to use AI to sexually abuse children, punishable by up to three years in prison.

“This is a real disturbing phenomenon. Online child sexual abuse material is growing, but also the grooming of children and teenagers online. And what’s now happening is that AI is putting this on steroids,” Interior Minister Yvette Cooper told Sky News on Sunday (February 2, 2025).

She said AI tools were making it easier for perpetrators “to groom children, and it’s also meaning that they are manipulating images of children and then using them to draw and to blackmail young people into further abuse.

“It’s just the most vile of crimes,” she added.

The new law would include banning “some of the AI models being used for child abuse,” said the Minister.

In Focus podcast | How safe is the online space for children in India?

“Other countries are not yet doing this, but I hope everyone else will follow,” she added.

AI tools are being used to generate child sexual abuse images by “nudeifying” real life images of children or by “stitching the faces of other children onto existing images,” said the government.

The new laws will also criminalise “predators who run websites designed for other paedophiles to share vile child sexual abuse content or advice on how to groom children,” punishable by up to ten years in prison, said the government.

Ms. Cooper told the BBC on Sunday (February 2, 2025) that a recent inquiry had found that around 500,000 children across the U.K. are victims of child abuse of some form each year, “and the online aspect of that is an increasing and growing part of it”.

The measures will be introduced as part of the Crime and Policing Bill when it comes to Parliament.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has warned of the growing number of sexual abuse AI images of children being produced. Over a 30-day period in 2024, IWF analysts identified 3,512 AI child abuse images on a single dark web site.

The number of the most serious category of images also rose by 10 percent in a year, it found.

Interacting with AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be fun and sometimes useful, but the next level of everyday AI goes beyond answering questions: AI agents carry out tasks for you.

Major technology companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce, have recently released or announced plans to develop and release AI agents. They claim these innovations will bring newfound efficiency to technical and administrative processes underlying systems used in health care, robotics, gaming and other businesses.

Simple AI agents can be taught to reply to standard questions sent over email. More advanced ones can book airline and hotel tickets for transcontinental business trips. Google recently demonstrated Project Mariner to reporters, a browser extension for Chrome that can reason about the text and images on your screen.

In the demonstration, the agent helped plan a meal by adding items to a shopping cart on a grocery chain’s website, even finding substitutes when certain ingredients were not available. A person still needs to be involved to finalize the purchase, but the agent can be instructed to take all of the necessary steps up to that point.

In a sense, you are an agent. You take actions in your world every day in response to things that you see, hear and feel. But what exactly is an AI agent? As a computer scientist, I offer this definition: AI agents are technological tools that can learn a lot about a given environment, and then – with a few simple prompts from a human – work to solve problems or perform specific tasks in that environment.

Rules and goals

A smart thermostat is an example of a very simple agent. Its ability to perceive its environment is limited to a thermometer that tells it the temperature. When the temperature in a room dips below a certain level, the smart thermostat responds by turning up the heat.

A familiar predecessor to today’s AI agents is the Roomba. The robot vacuum cleaner learns the shape of a carpeted living room, for instance, and how much dirt is on the carpet. Then it takes action based on that information. After a few minutes, the carpet is clean.

The smart thermostat is an example of what AI researchers call a simple reflex agent. It makes decisions, but those decisions are simple and based only on what the agent perceives in that moment. The robot vacuum is a goal-based agent with a singular goal: clean all of the floor that it can access. The decisions it makes – when to turn, when to raise or lower brushes, when to return to its charging base – are all in service of that goal.

A goal-based agent is successful merely by achieving its goal through whatever means are required. Goals can be achieved in a variety of ways, however, some of which could be more or less desirable than others.

Many of today’s AI agents are utility based, meaning they give more consideration to how to achieve their goals. They weigh the risks and benefits of each possible approach before deciding how to proceed. They are also capable of considering goals that conflict with each other and deciding which one is more important to achieve. They go beyond goal-based agents by selecting actions that consider their users’ unique preferences.

Making decisions, taking action

When technology companies refer to AI agents, they aren’t talking about chatbots or large language models like ChatGPT. Though chatbots that provide basic customer service on a website technically are AI agents, their perceptions and actions are limited. Chatbot agents can perceive the words that a user types, but the only action they can take is to reply with text that hopefully offers the user a correct or informative response.

The AI agents that AI companies refer to are significant advances over large language models like ChatGPT because they possess the ability to take actions on behalf of the people and companies who use them.

OpenAI says agents will soon become tools that people or businesses will leave running independently for days or weeks at a time, with no need to check on their progress or results. Researchers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind say agents are another step on the path to artificial general intelligence or “strong” AI – that is, AI that exceeds human capabilities in a wide variety of domains and tasks.

The AI systems that people use today are considered narrow AI or “weak” AI. A system might be skilled in one domain – chess, perhaps – but if thrown into a game of checkers, the same AI would have no idea how to function because its skills wouldn’t translate. An artificial general intelligence system would be better able to transfer its skills from one domain to another, even if it had never seen the new domain before.

Worth the risks?

Are AI agents poised to revolutionize the way humans work? This will depend on whether technology companies can prove that agents are equipped not only to perform the tasks assigned to them, but also to work through new challenges and unexpected obstacles when they arise.

Uptake of AI agents will also depend on people’s willingness to give them access to potentially sensitive data: Depending on what your agent is meant to do, it might need access to your internet browser, your email, your calendar and other apps or systems that are relevant for a given assignment. As these tools become more common, people will need to consider how much of their data they want to share with them.

A breach of an AI agent’s system could cause private information about your life and finances to fall into the wrong hands. Are you OK taking these risks if it means that agents can save you some work?

What happens when AI agents make a poor choice, or a choice that its user would disagree with? Currently, developers of AI agents are keeping humans in the loop, making sure people have an opportunity to check an agent’s work before any final decisions are made. In the Project Mariner example, Google won’t let the agent carry out the final purchase or accept the site’s terms of service agreement. By keeping you in the loop, the systems give you the opportunity to back out of any choices made by the agent that you don’t approve.

Like any other AI system, an AI agent is subject to biases. These biases can come from the data that the agent is initially trained on, the algorithm itself, or in how the output of the agent is used. Keeping humans in the loop is one method to reduce bias by ensuring that decisions are reviewed by people before being carried out.

The answers to these questions will likely determine how popular AI agents become, and depend on how much AI companies can improve their agents once people begin to use them.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Mumbai:

Granting relief to composer-singer Arijit Singh, the Bombay High Court has said AI tools generating content using a celebrity’s voice, image or other attributes without consent violate his or her “personality rights”.

Celebrities are particularly vulnerable to unauthorised generation of content through AI tools, the court said.

Hearing a petition filed by the famous singer, Justice R I Chagla in his interim order on July 26 restrained eight online platforms from using Singh’s “personality rights”, and directed them to remove all such content and also voice conversion tools.

The singer had moved the court claiming that these platforms provide AI tools to synthesize artificial sound recordings by mimicking his voice, mannerisms and other attributes.

Arijit Singh has consciously refrained from any kind of brand endorsement or gross commercialization of his personality traits for the past several years, his lawyer Hiren Kamod said.

The high court agreed that Singh should be given interim relief.

“What shocks the conscience of this court is the manner in which celebrities, particularly performers such as the present plaintiff are vulnerable to being targeted by unauthorized generative AI content,” the judge said.

The freedom of speech and expression allows for critique and commentary but does not grant the license to exploit a celebrity’s persona for commercial gain, Justice Chagla said.

“Making AI tools available that enable the conversion of any voice into that of a celebrity without his/her permission constitutes a violation of the celebrity’s personality rights,” it added.

Such tools facilitate “unauthorized appropriation and manipulation” of a celebrity’s voice, a key component of their personal identity, Justice Chagla said.

Further, such use of the AI technology also undermines celebrities’ ability to prevent “deceptive uses of their identity,” the HC said.

Such platforms are emboldening Internet users to create counterfeit sound recordings and videos, it observed.

Singh has gained immense goodwill and reputation over the course of a very successful career, the judge noted.

“Prima facie, I am of the view that the plaintiff’s personality traits including his name, voice, photograph/ caricature, image, likeness, persona and other attributes of his personality are protectable elements of his personality rights,” Justice Chagla said.

Advocate Kamod told the court that Arijit Singh hails from a small town and has humble beginnings, and now he is one of the most celebrated singers in the world.

The petition, filed through Legasis Partners, sought protection of his personality rights with regard to his name, voice, signatures, photograph, image, caricature, likeness, persona, and various other attributes of his personality against unauthorized/unlicensed commercial exploitation and misuse.

Several YouTube channels were creating memes and GIFs “causing ridicule, embarrassment and humiliation” and affecting the singer’s reputation, it said.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)