Indistinguishable from Reality: AI Threat in Canada’s Child Abuse Cases
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has announced that one-third of all online child sexual abuse investigations in Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) now involve material generated or manipulated by artificial intelligence. Police officials state that these AI-generated “deepfakes” are becoming increasingly realistic, making them harder and harder to distinguish from genuine imagery.
Under Section 163.1 of the Canadian Criminal Code, any material depicting a minor for a sexual purpose is treated identically under the law, regardless of whether it is AI-generated or depicts real individuals. Authorities emphasize that these fictional or altered images are frequently weaponized in sextortion schemes, where perpetrators threaten to leak explicit material to extort money or additional images from victims. While the P.E.I. RCMP recorded 26 reported instances of sextortion last year, local police departments in Summerside and Charlottetown have also identified cases involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material and sextortion this year.
Experts, notably Jacques Marcoux from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, stress that AI models indiscriminately scrape images of real children from across the internet and mainstream platforms; consequently, even when AI-generated material does not depict real children, the harm remains significant. Highlighting that AI is actively driving interest and demand in this sphere, both child protection advocates and law enforcement officials urge that AI-generated exploitation must be systematically tracked to gauge the true scale of the crisis.