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On April 8, 2026, Pennsylvania State Trooper Stephen Kamnik pleaded to criminal charges related to using state computers to make AI porn. The month before that, a group of Lancaster County juveniles were given probation for using AI to create child sexual abuse material*. In the case of the juveniles, they were using pictures of their classmates to create the fake sexual images.
When The New Yorker published an article investigating Grok, it pointed out that the AI program could be used to create child sexual abuse material but it didn’t talk about the fact that using AI to generate child pornography could be against the law.
In Pennsylvania, child sexual abuse material is illegal to make or possess regardless of how it was created. For adult material, it’s illegal to share or publish AI porn or sexual material of another person if it’s done with “intent to harass, alarm, or annoy another.”
Although one might assume that the AI tools would have some type of feature to prevent users from creating illegal material, that’s not the case. It’s up to individual AI users to know whether the content they are creating is against the law or not.
Bickerton Law Blog Lawyer’s Take: “The law is often slow to catch up with the legal problems that technology can create. That’s not the case when it comes to AI porn. The legislature moved pretty quickly to make AI child sexual material illegal and the consequences of making or possessing that type of material are fairly dire. Those offenses are graded as felonies and come with lengthy sex offender registrations.”
Key Takeaways:
- A Pennsylvania State Trooper was convicted of using AI to generate child sexual abuse material on a government computer.
- Lancaster County teens were given probation for making AI sexual abuse material of their classmates.
- Just because AI will let you do something doesn’t mean that it’s not illegal.
*Pennsylvania uses the term “child sexual abuse material” and not “child pornography”
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