“I’ve been describing it as quite heartbreaking,” AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett told reporters on Friday.
Barrett said reading a new research paper titled AI and non-AI online child sexual victimisation: A national study of Australian Adolescents has proved to be sober reading and provided the AFP with valuable insights.
One in four children under 18 have experienced online sexual victimisation, or are friends with someone who has, a recent Adelaide University study found.
About 15 per cent of those crimes involved artificial intelligence, with the technology used as a tool in a quarter of incidents of non-consensual sharing of sexual images.
“It is not surprising,” Barrett said.
“We are seeing a growing caseload of young people being either manipulated, exploited, radicalised in the online space, and how that is manifesting through emerging technology.”
So-called “nudify” apps, which undress people in images, have been the target of a major crackdown by the eSafety Commissioner and will face further restrictions under the government’s looming Digital Duty of Care.
But chatbots are also increasingly where those victimised children turn, meaning ensuring AI is saying the right things is now paramount.
“One of the most concerning findings of the [AI and non-AI online child sexual victimisation] research is that, of the children who reported being sexually victimised online, 35 per cent either told no one or turned to an AI chatbot for help.
“More than 15 per cent of young people also reported seeking personal or counselling advice from AI at least once a week.
Among victimised boys, two in five disclosed their experiences solely to an AI bot or kept quiet entirely.
Barrett said parents and caregivers need to know that this is happening.
“… and I urge them to have conversations with their children about coming forward to a trusted adult, including law enforcement, if they are being sexually exploited online, so the appropriate help and support can be provided,” she said.
“When someone reaches out for help, particularly about child exploitation or abuse, every minute can matter.”
Horror stories about large language models goading young people to take their own lives or advising them on how to do it have made global headlines.
In May 2025, a 16-year-old British boy asked ChatGPT for how best to take his own life on a railway line, and the bot obliged, with the teen killing himself that way hours later.
The previous month, ChatGPT had also encouraged and given a California boy detailed instructions on how to commit suicide, which he later did.
“We are talking to industry about how they can ensure chatbots and other AI models provide sound advice,” Barrett said.
AI will now play a larger role in how the AFP elevates and responds to victims disclosing incidents of abuse.
A bot will soon be weaved into the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation’s online reporting tool to flag entries who might be at greater risk of self-harm.
Rather than lying in an inbox, the alert would ping an AFP officer by phone to get an immediate response.
The force says it is baking AI into a number of systems to monitor and triage correspondence and hunt down their origins, but the commissioner stressed human judgement was not about to be replaced with technology.
Chatbots would also eventually be required to protect children from content that encourages eating disorders, life-endangering stunts and which causes mental health distress, under the proposed Digital Duty of Care.
AI and non-AI online child sexual victimisation: A national study of Australian Adolescents, authored by Tim Cubitt and his team at the Australian Cybercrime Observatory at Adelaide University, identified seven central findings:
- The concerning prevalence of online child sexual victimisation identified in data in 2021 is persisting in 2026;
- Girls are victimised at higher rates than boys;
- AI is being used to victimise young people at concerning rates, especially through image-based sexual abuse such as nude photographs;
- When AI has been used to target youth for online sexual material, more boys are being victimised;
- Boys are more likely to disclose their experiences of online sexual victimisation to AI rather than authority figures such as teachers, police or other reporting lines;
- Of those boys, two in five did not disclose their victimisation to any human – only to AI or no one; and
- Both AI and non-AI online child sexualised victim experiences were clustered in peer groups, meaning those who had a friend experience victimisation were more likely to experience victimisation themselves.
(with AAP)
