Australia will require AI-made child abuse material to be removed from search results

Australia will make search engines like Google and Bing take steps to prevent AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

Australia will make search engines like Google and Bing take steps to prevent the sharing of child sexual abuse material created by artificial intelligence, the country's internet regulator said on Friday.

A new code drafted by the industry giants at the government's request will require search engines to ensure that such content is not returned in search results, e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.

It will also require that AI functions built into search engines cannot produce synthetic versions of the same material, she said. Synthetic versions of the material are also known as deepfakes.

"The use of generative AI has grown so quickly that I think it's caught the whole world off guard to a certain degree," Inman Grant said.

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The code presents an example of how the regulatory and legal landscape surrounding internet platforms is being rehsaped by the explosion of products which automatically generate lifelike content.

Inman Grant said an earlier code drafted by Google, owned by Alphabet, and Bing, owned by Microsoft, did not cover AI-generated content, so she asked them to go back to the drawing board.