A 47-year-old man has been convicted and fined \u20ac400 at the district court in Tralee after he pleaded guilty to possessing child pornographic material, generated using artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Stephen Buckley, of Hunters Wood, Ballyseedy, Tralee in Co Kerry, is believed to be the first person in the country to be convicted of possession of AI-generated child pornographic material.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children alerted detectives in the Garda Online Exploitation Unit in Dublin to suspicious activity on his phone.<\/p>\n
Garda\u00ed in Tralee secured a warrant and searched Buckley’s home in February 2024.<\/p>\n
They spoke to him and seized a number of phones.<\/p>\n
An examination of the phones revealed child pornographic images, including one of a young girl which had been digitally manipulated using an app.<\/p>\n
Buckley was arrested and charged.<\/p>\n
He pleaded guilty to possessing four child pornographic images which were generated using AI.<\/p>\n
Buckley admitted possessing one image which was manipulated using an AI app to digitally undress the teenage girl in the picture.<\/p>\n
He also pleaded guilty to possessing three animation or cartoon-like videos in which teenagers were depicted in sexual acts.<\/p>\n
Defence solicitor Pat Mann told the court that Buckley had no previous convictions.<\/p>\n
He said the matter had had a devastating effect on his client.<\/p>\n
Mr Mann pleaded with the court to deal with the case without recording a criminal conviction against Buckley, saying he had cooperated “completely” and had attended dozens of counselling sessions to address his issues.<\/p>\n
Judge David Waters described the offence as serious and said it was appropriate to record a conviction.<\/p>\n
He said the fact that the material was downloaded showed there was an element of deliberation and pre-meditation involved.<\/p>\n
The judge said the portrayal of the presence of the material on Buckley’s phone as “almost accidental” did not stand up.<\/p>\n
He convicted and fined him \u20ac400.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 47-year-old man has been convicted and fined \u20ac400 at the district court in Tralee after he pleaded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-469730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}