Abby McCloskey, Bloomberg Opinion, January 19, 2025

“The pre-AI world is gone. Estimates suggest that already, as many as one in eight kids personally knows someone who has been the target of a deepfake photo or video, with numbers rising to one in four who have seen a sexualized deepfake of someone they recognize, either a friend or a celebrity. This is a real problem, and it’s one that lawmakers are suddenly waking up to.

In the 1980s, when I was a kid, it was a picture of a missing child on a milk carton from across the country that encapsulated parental fears. In 2026, it’s an AI-generated suggestive image of a loved one.”