Local and state officials held a press conference at the Kenton County Government Center on Monday to highlight the work surrounding House Bill 207. Passed this year, HB 207 amends existing child sex crime laws to ban both AI-generated child porn and sex dolls made in the likenesses of children.
“This particular bill puts Kentucky at the technological forefront in combating child sex dolls and computer generated CSAM, which is child sex abuse material,” Jeremy Murrell, the Kentucky Attorney General’s deputy commissioner for Counter Exploitation. “This legislation will be a model for other states moving forward.”
Numerous state legislators and local leaders, including Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, Kenton County Judge/Executive Kris Knochelmann, Kentucky Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-Ryland Heights), Kentucky Sen. Shelley Funke Frommeyer (R-Alexandria) and Kentucky Rep. Stephanie Dietz (R-Edgewood), the latter of whom sponsored the bill, all attended the conference.
“It started with [Kenton County Commowealth’s Attorney] Rob Sanders contacting me in 2023 and saying, ‘We have a problem,'” Dietz said. Sanders also attended the press conference.
The bill came out of a concern for child sex dolls initially. It didn’t go anywhere in 2023, but Dietz said she spent the interim working with Kentucky State Police and McDaniel to revise the bill, adding the ban against AI child porn, and shepherd it through the General Assembly in 2024.
As examples of the problem, Sanders spoke of three cases in 2018 and 2019 where suspects had been caught with child sex dolls. These cases proved difficult to prosecute as there were no laws on the books against the possession of such dolls.
“We had to battle the litigation because the defense would argue that it was not illegal to have a child-sized sex doll,” Sanders said. “So we actually lost one of the cases on a suppression motion, and all the evidence got suppressed, and a child predator went free.”
Sanders said the county was able to win the other two cases, but it took some legal wrangling to get the cases to take in court. Rather than prosecute the doll itself, they had to prove the suspects possessed conventional child pornography.
“We shouldn’t have to litigate this hard to prove to a court that we know that someone that has a child sized sex doll will also be preying upon children, will also have child pornography in their possession,” Sanders said.
Coleman said the laws had already made a difference, citing a July case out of Metcalfe County where a man, 57-year old Steven Hurt, had been caught with child sex doll fashioned out of a toy. Arrest documents from the case indicate Hurt also had over 150 files of child pornography across multiple devices.
AI technology, on the other hand, is now capable of (very convincingly) approximating the likenesses of real people, including minors, based off of photographic training data. Although the acts in AI child porn don’t correspond to actual acts like they do in conventional child porn, it can still be used to extort, humiliate or enact revenge upon a victim; the fact that such material exists at all can be traumatic in and of itself.
As reported by the MIT Technology Review in 2021, about 90% of deepfake videos online from December of 2018 to the time of that article’s publication were non-consensual porn videos, most of which were trained on the likenesses of adult women.
A study from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children published in 2018 measured cases of child pornography production from 2011 to 2014 where a victim had been identified, finding 1,965 cases involving one offender and one victim. It also identified 633 cases involving multiple offenders and victims.
“The legislation itself is horrific in what it covers, the conduct that it covers,” Coleman said.
Coleman spoke about ramping up penalties for offenders and ensuring they were kept away from kids in the long term. Currently, child porn charges carry a 1 to 5 year sentence in Kentucky.
To that end, Coleman and Murell discussed his office’s use of a special detecting dog named Charity. Charity can spell a chemical coolant in digital devices called triphenylphosphine oxide, or TPPO. Every device capable of holding digital data contains TPPO, so Charity can sniff out hidden electronic and storage devices that may contain offending material.
See Detective Shelby Guffey, Charity’s handler, demonstrate the process by watching the video below.
