‘Everybody should be terrified.’ Why is it still legal to use AI to make fake nudes of kids in Massachusetts?

Editor’s note: The following story contains discussions of online child sexual abuse material. If you or someone you know is the victim of such abuse, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children offers support and resources at 1-800-843-5678.

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The rooms were freshly repainted, the furniture all cleaned out. Ann’s boyfriend of 18 months was hours from moving in with her and her 14-year-old daughter when he made a quick run to his storage unit.

Ann had stayed back in his house to finish cleaning up the place when she spotted his iPad on the floor. She paused. She’d been hoping for a serious relationship after a decade of raising three kids on her own. Her boyfriend was clever and good-looking, had quickly bonded with her kids, and had been spending at least three nights a week at her place. He’d taken particular interest in her youngest daughter, giving her rides to school, following her on social media, and sharing inside jokes. Ann trusted him. Her daughter did too.

“I was really eager to have another adult in my life in every way that single moms need help,” said Ann, who asked the Globe to use a pseudonym to protect her family’s privacy.

Still, she had suspicions.

Months earlier, she had found a condom wrapper in his bed at his home. He’d denied having an affair. Now, as she looked at his iPad, she needed to be sure.

She’d been reading a book on the device, and knew his password. As she began scrolling through text messages, Ann found a series of links her boyfriend had sent himself. She clicked one and found a digitally altered image of a woman suggestively kissinga piece of fruit. Ann grimaced.

Then she clicked another link.

It was “absolute shock,” she recalled. “The kind where your blood just turns cold.”

On screen were two images digitally juxtaposed to appear as if they were taken in succession, like a strip from a photo booth: One was of her daughter wearing a camisole, leaning forward. The other was of a girl whose head was tilted back, but whose features looked identical to her daughter’s. In that image, the girl’scamisole was pulled down to reveal her breasts, and she was masturbating.

Ann looked frantically at the two images. The second girl’s hair was the same shade as her daughter’s, her jawline a near perfect match. Engulfed with fear and panic, she tried to imagine a circumstance where her daughter may have posed like this.

“I thought they were absolutely both of my daughter,” she said.

They were not.

The photos had been digitally collaged alongside each other by Ann’s boyfriend, using a tool like Photoshop. He later told his therapist he’d “superimposed [Ann’s daughter’s] face onto an image of a nude model” in another composite image,according to a mandatory reporter form the therapist filed with the Department of Children and Families, which was seen by the Globe. The Globe is not naming the boyfriend because he was not charged with a crime.

This was six years ago, long before “nudify” apps or AI chatbots like Grok that can remove clothing from people ininnocent images. But then as now, one fact remains: Massachusetts isn’t doing enough to help stop it.

Taking, possessing, or sharing sexually explicit images of children is a federal crime. But manipulating benign images to make them sexually explicit is not illegal here in Massachusetts, even if those images depict real kids. It’s a growing problem. In just three years, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which acts as a clearinghouse for such reports, has seen an exponential growth of AI-generated abuse images reported to its CyberTipline: From 4,700 in 2023, to 67,000 in 2024, to 1.5 million in 2025.

While other states have updated their laws to address the rise of fake nudes and obscene AI-generated images of children, Massachusetts is one of only five states that has not.

“Forty-five states have taken steps to modify their child sexual abuse material statutes to include AI-generated materials,” said Lindsay Hawthorne, of the Boston-based child advocacy group Enough Abuse. “Massachusetts needs to do the same.”

Some lawmakers are trying. Two bills on Beacon Hill would amend current laws to ensure that anyone creating or sharing computer-generated “child sexual abuse visual material” would be subject to stronger fines and criminal penalties. With the legislative session nearing its conclusion in July, both bills remain in committee in the Senate.

“Massachusetts can continue leading in AI and technological innovation while also making clear that these tools cannot be used to exploit or harm children,” said state Senator Paul W. Mark, the sponsor of one of the bills. “This legislation takes an important step to protect minors from AI-generated sexual abuse material while supporting the responsible development of emerging technologies.”

Deepfakes and graphic images of children derived from otherwise-innocent photos are a rapidly growing problem. In 2024, after multiple attempts, Massachusetts became the 49th state to pass legislation banning the distribution of “revenge porn.” So now anyone seeking to harass or intimidate someone by sharing their sexually explicit images can face criminal charges. Those cases tend to involve adults who were aware the images were being taken at the time.

In the case of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, the images are of children who often have no idea they’re being targeted.

Investigators point to examples of offenders pulling photos from the web, or snapping photos of children in playgrounds, and manipulating them using AI tools. “Nudify” apps are readily available in app stores, Hawthorne said.

The problem is increasingly cropping up in local schools, and it was thrust into the global spotlight late last year when people discovered that Grok, an AI-chatbot popular on social media platform X, was being used to remove the clothes from images of women and children.

After the uproar, X withdrew that function on Grok, but the technology is changing so fast advocates say it’s inexplicable that Massachusetts hasn’t yet criminalized such actions.

Jetta Bernier, who has led Enough Abuse for six decades, says she hopes that the attention will spark the Legislature to finally do something. Beacon Hill is famously slow to act, while lawmakers, she said, typically reflect the concerns of their voters, and this issue is so dark that many people prefer not to think about it. At this point though, they may have no choice.

“It’s such a no-brainer,” said Phoebe Walker, who works on regional public health initiatives in Franklin County. “AI is changing every week, and we don’t even have this guardrail in place. It seems so irresponsible not to have weighed in on this as a state to protect kids.”

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Ann has seen the lack of guardrails firsthand.

After finding the collaged image of her daughter on her boyfriend’s iPad in 2020, she took a photo of it, and abruptly left his home.

She laterdetermined that the photo of her daughter in the camisole had been taken from a friend’s Instagram account and that the nude photo was not actually her daughter, but rather a girl with extraordinarily similar features. That didn’t ease Ann’s fears. She was horrified that her boyfriend might be sexually attracted to her daughter, and knew he had a 12-year-old of his own.

Ann ended the relationship. She didn’t tell her daughter about the pictures, but told her he had been stalking teenage girls online. And then Ann called the Department of Children and Families, the district attorney’s office, and the local police. That’s where the frustration really started.

DCF said it wouldn’t investigate because Ann’s now-ex-boyfriend was not considered a caretaker of her child. In a report, the local police said putting the images side-by-side did not qualify as a “blatant crime” (they concluded that the naked, masturbating girl may have been of legal age).

A few months later, Ann contacted then-Attorney General MauraHealey’s office.

A state trooper with the cybercrimes unit was assigned to investigate. But prosecutors in the AG’s office eventually told Ann there was nothing they could do: The manipulated image did not meet the standards for child sexual abuse material in Massachusetts.

“Consequently, the perpetrator was not questioned, the children were not forensically evaluated, and no charges were brought,” Ann wrote in testimony she submitted during a legislative hearing on Beacon Hill.She wrote that her ex-boyfriend had admitted to his ex-wife that he created images like this to indulge his “stepfather fantasies” and agreed to attend counseling. In her mandatory report, his therapist also reported that he expressed “enormous remorse and shame” and was “determined to never do harm.”

A year after they broke up, Ann learned that his child would begin attending her daughter’s high school and that he would be allowed on campus. The superintendent told Ann that there were no laws preventing him from being on school grounds. That’s when she started having regular panic attacks.

Ann reached out to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for support and learned that manipulating images to create child sexual abuse material was considered a federal crime but did not meet the standards for the state’s child pornography law.

For Ann, that was the final straw. For five years now, she’s been working closely with the center and Enough Abuse to push for state legislation that would criminalize the digital creation or manipulation of sexually explicit images of children. In that time, states across the country have already passed such measures— more than 20 since 2024. Meanwhile, Ann has watched as AI has made creating these images ever easier.

“Three years ago, as I’m hearing about AI technology, my first thought was, this is just a field day for pedophiles,” she said. “I remember having conversations with people like ‘This is going to make things so much worse. Do you know what people are going to do with this technology?’”

But she also assumed it would spur some action. On that front, she’s still waiting.

The two proposals on Beacon Hill would subject convicted offenders to up to10 years in prison and fines of up to $50,000. One, introduced by Senator Michael Moore, would also ensure that any minors charged under the new law could undergo an educational diversion program instead of prosecution.

Moore said the two bills would put Massachusetts in line with other states and close the gap that exists between legislation and widely available tools.

“There is a need for us to revisit preexisting statutes that may be out of line with how certain predatory acts can be conducted today,” he said. “We need to bring the laws up to date with technology.”

As the bills make their way through Senate committees, advocates are still hopeful they can go further, to cover the distribution of AI-generated material and the use of AI prompts to create images. They could be added to a larger bill moving through the Legislature that aims to improve online safety for children. Senate leadership, meanwhile, is reviewing the measures.

“Any abuse of children is deplorable. Chair Rodrigues and his colleagues on the Senate Ways and Means Committee take this topic seriously, and they are actively reviewing the legislation,” said Sean Fitzgerald, spokesperson for Ways and Means chair Michael Rodrigues.

Should the legislation not pass this time, advocates fear, the technology could be even farther ahead of regulations by the time lawmakers get back to it in 2027 or even 2028.

“The legislative process, no matter where it is, it’s slow quite often, and deliberative, and it’s supposed to be,” said Yiota Souras, senior vice president and general counsel for the national exploitation center. “I guess I would say it is taking longer than it does in some states.”

For Ann, who’s been watching the rapid evolution of AI, waiting means allowing more harm to happen. And every time she sees a parent post a picture of their kid online now, her first thought is what a pedophile could do with that image.

“I think we should all be with pitchforks in hand. I know there’s too much at stake,” she said. “Everybody should be terrified.”

This is the latest in an ongoing series of stories about the rapid spread of child sexual abuse material online. To read prior installments, click here.

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