An Amity man was given a 90-year prison sentence on Friday for possessing child sexual assault materials, which included pictures of real youngsters and adult women that he created with artificial intelligence software.
Before Clark County Circuit Judge Blake Batson, 33-year-old Ethan Tanner Fagan entered a guilty plea. Prosecuting Attorney Dan Turner’s suggested sentence was imposed.
Fagan was found guilty of 30 counts of possessing, creating, and disseminating what law enforcement increasingly refers to as child sexual assault material, or CSAM.
Following an investigation based on a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Arkansas State Police took Fagan into custody on April 27, 2024.
According to a press release from Turner, Fagan’s photos included friends and family from Clark County and the neighboring areas. Special Agent Chris Harper of the state police, in collaboration with the FBI’s Cleveland field office, found evidence of communications and CSAM image transfers between Fagan and a person in Ohio.
According to Turner, the employment of AI to create pictures of real children and adults in Clark County and the nearby areas made this instance particularly unsettling.
The use of AI to create materials about child sexual abuse is still in its infancy in Arkansas, but it is something we anticipate becoming more widespread, said Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin in a statement late Friday.
For this reason, earlier this year, my office collaborated closely with lawmakers to pass Act 977, which modified our current CSAM laws to expressly forbid the use of AI to produce CSAM that is identical to photos of actual people, Griffin continued.
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