New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested on “felony charges related to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” Bucks County Detectives said in a press release Thursday.
In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”
On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.
Fitzgerald was charged after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip that a Discord user shared an illicit image in July. Cops then used “digital forensics and subscriber records” linked to the Discord account and “associated Internet protocol addresses” to track the user to Fitzgerald’s home address.
After a search Thursday, cops “recovered prompts and scripts used to create artificially generated child sexual abuse material using an AI program,” the press release said. They also found Discord chat logs where Fitzgerald, under the Discord username “thegentlemanpervert_2160_07833,” allegedly “admitted to making multiple illicit images using artificial intelligence and sharing them with other users.”
