ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) has put child sexual abuse “on steroids,” the Home Secretary warned yesterday as she announced new bans on computer-generated material.

Yvette Cooper said owning an AI tool, which can generate these pictures, could land offenders with a five-year prison sentence.

Users found to own AI-made “paedophile manuals” could also face up to three years in prison under measures the government has proposed as part of the Crime and Policing Bill.

She said these would give law enforcers the power to “keep more children safe.”

Ms Cooper told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips programme: “This is a real, disturbing phenomenon that we’ve got where we’ve known for some time the online child sexual abuse material is growing, but also the grooming of children, teenagers online.

“What’s now happening is that AI is putting this on steroids and it is making it easier for perpetrators, for abusers, to groom children, and it’s also meaning that they are manipulating images of children and then using them to draw and to blackmail young people into further abuse.”

Fake images are being used to blackmail children and force them to livestream further abuse, according to the Home Office, and ministers fear online abuse can lead viewers to offend in person.

Ms Cooper said: “Very often they’re using images of real children and then abusing them, manipulating them and making them sexualised.

“These are being circulated then in these huge forums and what the National Crime Agency will say is this is drawing more perpetrators into more extreme and more sadistic abuse.”

The Bill will also introduce a specific offence for paedophiles who run websites to share child sex abuse which could carry a 10-year prison sentence.