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.”