Kaylin Hayman, 16, arrived home from school one day to get a phone call from the FBI. An investigator informed her that a man living thousands of miles away had sexually assaulted her without her knowledge.
The investigator stated that Kaylin’s face was placed on photographs of adults committing sexual actions.
“I burst into tears when I heard,” Kaylin says. “This feels like an invasion of my privacy. It doesn’t feel true that someone I don’t know can see me in this way.”
Kaylin featured in the Disney TV series Just Roll With It for numerous seasons before being targeted among other child performers.
“My innocence was just stripped away from me in that moment,” she tells me. “As a 12-year-old girl, I was heartbroken by those images. I felt very lonely because I had no idea this was a global crime.”
However, Kaylin’s experience is far from rare. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States, there were 4,700 reports of photos or videos of children’s sexual exploitation created using generative AI last year.
