The arrest of Daniel Clark Warren was Martin County’s first involving artificial intelligence in 2024
A 53-year-old Jensen Beach man was sentenced to more than 84 years in prison on 82 counts of child pornography in Martin County’s first arrest in a case involving artificial intelligence in 2024.
On Wednesday, Daniel Clark Warren was sentenced by Circuit Judge Elizabeth Metzger to 1,013.1 months in prison with credit for 1,002 days already served. The judge denied the defense’s request for a downward departure from the sentence.
In July, before a scheduled jury trial, he changed his plea to guilty on all counts of child sexual abuse material and video voyeurism involving a minor. It was amended in August.
Warren was arrested on Jan. 26, 2024, after detectives received an internet crime tip about child pornography.
“It’s pretty scary when you look at this stuff,” Det. Brian Broughton said at the time about creating the images using AI.
“This is our first case in Martin County where we have seen AI taking a regular headshot and then turning them into child porn and it’s alarming to us,” John Budensiek, chief deputy at the time and now sheriff, said.
At least one image was of a child under the age of 5, according to the arrest report.
“What he does is he takes the face of a child and then he sexualizes that removes the clothing and poses the child and engages them in certain sexual activity and that’s the images that he’s making with his AI,” Broughton said.
It took several months for the state to arrest him.
“The reason why we waited this long to put it out is because our detectives have been working with other jurisdictions to try and figure out if there are other cases related to this,” Budensiek said.
The FBI warns child sexual abuse material created with content manipulation technologies, to include generative artificial intelligence, is illegal.
“There’s been a couple of years now we’ve seen the deepfakes with celebrities and politicians,” Broughton said. “This is just a new level. This is scary stuff.”
Since then, AI has become more prominent with even better deepfakes.