A paedophile who made thousands of pounds by creating child abuse images using AI and real pictures of children has been jailed for 18 years in a landmark case.
Hugh Nelson used a 3D character generator to turn ordinary, non-explicit pictures of children into child abuse images, before selling them on an internet forum used by artists.
People who knew the children in the real world would send the 27-year-old images of them.
Nelson, from Bolton, would then charge his network of paedophiles £80 for a new “character”. After that, it was £10 per image to animate them in different, explicit positions.
Over an 18-month period, Nelson admits he made around £5,000 from selling these images.
In some cases, Nelson then went on to encourage his clients to rape and sexually assault the children, the court heard.
In a police interview, the paedophile told officers: “A lot of my characters were commissioned by their dads, uncles, family friends.”
Jeanette Smith, a specialist prosecutor for the CPS, said: “This is one of the first cases of its kind that demonstrates a link between people like Nelson, who are creating computer-generated images using technology, and the real-life offending that goes on behind that.”
A number of paedophiles have been sent to prison recently for using AI to create child abuse images.
In Nelson’s case, however, police were able to link the images he generated to real children for the first time.
Nelson, who had no previous convictions, was arrested at his family home in Egerton, Bolton, in June last year and told police he had a sexual interest mainly in girls aged about 12.
The children who he was sent pictures of were all based abroad, in France, Italy and the United States.
Police officers in those countries have been passed information about Nelson’s offending, and more arrests have been made.
Although this is the first time someone has been prosecuted for creating this kind of child abuse imagery, the authorities are preparing for many more.
Inside the Internet Watch Foundation in Cambridge, dozens of analysts scour the internet every day, hunting down child abuse images and removing them from the internet.
In the last six months, they’ve seen more child abuse images made using AI than they did all of last year.
Dan Sexton, the charity’s chief technical officer, said: “Our work has always been difficult anyway.
“[But] we’ve never had to deal with the possibility that someone could download some software on their computer and create an infinite amount of new images.
“They use as many as they can until the hard drives fill up. That’s a new type of harm that which we have not been prepared for.”
One of the charity’s analysts, known only as Jeff when he’s at work to protect his identity, said he was worried about how convincing AI imagery is becoming.
“We’re reaching the point now where even a trained analyst would struggle to see whether it was real or not,” he said.
In August, Nelson pleaded guilty at Bolton Crown Court to 11 offences, including three counts of encouraging the rape of a child under 13, one count of attempting to incite a boy under 16 to engage in a sexual act, three counts each of the distribution and making of indecent images, and one count of possessing prohibited images.
At an earlier court appearance in July 2023, he also pleaded guilty to four counts of distributing indecent pseudo photographs of children and one of publishing an obscene article.
Detective Constable Carly Baines, from Greater Manchester Police, said the case was “deeply horrifying”.
She added: “It became clear to us after extensive trawls of his many devices by digital forensic experts however, that his behaviour went far beyond what clearly he was seeing as a ‘business opportunity’.
“Not only was he creating and selling these images, but he was engaging in depraved sexualised chat online about children and going as far as to encourage people interested in his online content to commit contact offences such as rape against children they knew or were related to.”