New cases follow one in April and three Tennesseans’ federal lawsuit against Elon Musk’s AI company.
Image: Officers monitor activity across the city inside the Community Safety Center at MNPD headquarters. Image Credit: Martin B. Cherry / Nashville Banner
***Note from The Tennessee Conservative – this article posted here for informational purposes only.
This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
by Steven Hale [The Nashville Banner, Creative Commons] –
Nashville police made two arrests last week that highlight the way generative artificial intelligence technology is supercharging the sexual exploitation of children online.
On Aug. 19, the Metro Nashville Police Department announced that Timothy Waite II, 44 — a convicted sex offender — had been arrested for allegedly uploading an “AI-generated child sex abuse image” to the online messaging platform Discord. The next day, the department announced it had arrested Clarence Smith Jr., 39, after detectives found child sex abuse material (CSAM) on two Google accounts of his as well as an account with SpaceXAI.
In both cases, the MNPD’s investigations into the men were prompted by CyberTips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The organization started tracking tips involving AI — including cases where a person used AI to create sexual images of children — in 2023. That year, its CyberTipline received 4,700 notices. Just two years later, in 2025, more than 400,000 reports came in. Those included more than 7,000 tips related to “users generating or possessing GAI CSAM,” more than 30,000 reports of “users attempting to generate GAI CSAM by uploading a file and using text prompts” and more than 145,000 reports of “users using GAI to engage or alter a CSAM file without text prompts included.”
A report released this year by the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation stated that “the use of AI to generate child sexual abuse material is continuing to increase in scale, sophistication and accessibility.” The tools used to create such material range from text-to-image models to so-called “nudify” apps.
“We now face a technological landscape that can generate infinite violations with unprecedented ease,” the organization said in announcing its latest report.
The term “landscape” would seem particularly appropriate since CSAM, and the ability to generate it with AI, has not been isolated to the darker corners of the internet. According to researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, during an 11-day period across December 2025 and January 2026, the X-based AI assistant Grok created three million sex-related images, including approximately 23,000 of children. Earlier this year, three plaintiffs from Tennessee filed a federal lawsuit against Musk’s company then known as xAI alleging that a since-arrested perpetrator had used Grok to create fake sexual images and videos of them based on real childhood pictures of them. The AI-generated images were then posted online.
The company announced in January that Grok would no longer be able to create such images.
The two recent CSAM arrests involving AI in Nashville come after another case in April, in which Jerry Dubose II, 47, was arrested for allegedly using Grok “to generate images of child sex abuse” months earlier.
According to an arrest affidavit filed in court, Waite’s arrest last week came nearly eight months after the MNPD received a tip from the NCMEC, which had received a report in October 2025 from Discord. The messaging platform reported a specific account that had shared an image of a nude prepubescent boy potentially generated by AI in a direct message with another user. The platform’s report included the IP address associated with the account. An MNPD detective then sent a subpoena to Google for the subscriber information connected to the IP address, leading authorities to Waite’s Madison residence. In Smith’s case, an arrest affidavit says NCMEC passed along a tip it had received in March from Google reporting 50 CSAM files in one account connected to him and 36 in another. Another tip in May from SpaceXAI reported that an account connected to Smith had uploaded 153 CSAM files into Grok.
MNPD spokesperson Kris Mumford told the Banner that in Smith’s case, the images he is currently charged for were not AI-generated but that the files in his possession may include some that were. She said additional charges are possible.
One Response
We NEED our spineless “leaders” to get a handle on AI and we NEED EFFECTIVE punishments for ALL crime.