A former Army soldier pleaded guilty to child exploitation crimes committed in Alaska and Texas, including attempted production of child sexual abuse material depicting minors known to him and trafficking of CSAM. Seth Herrera, 36, used encrypted applications and the dark web to access, receive and transport CSAM on his cell phones; starting in December 2022 he used AI chatbots on Telegram and other websites to create morphed CSAM, taking non-explicit images of children—some known to him personally—and using AI to undress and morph bodies to make it appear they were engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Beginning in March 2021, Herrera took surreptitious photos and recordings of minors via security cameras, using AI to enhance quality; he uploaded over 100 files to a public group on an encrypted platform in six weeks.
The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-enhanced CSAM, documented in Herrera's guilty plea, is an emergent threat that Guardii's dedicated AI-generated-CSAM and deepfake detection module is purpose-built to address. Guardii's platform scans direct messages and shared files in real time for morphed, synthetic or AI-manipulated sexual content involving minors, flagging it for immediate review and enabling rapid escalation to law enforcement before distribution widens. Herrera's use of Telegram and other encrypted apps to create and share morphed images of children underscores the necessity of detection systems that operate at the messaging layer, not merely at the platform perimeter. With AI generation tools now accessible to any offender, Guardii's real-time interception of synthetic CSAM offers the only scalable line of defence against a category of abuse that traditional content-matching cannot catch.
