Federal prosecutors have charged a Wisconsin man for allegedly using a popular artificial intelligence image generator to create thousands of explicit images of children, marking what is potentially the first federal charge of creating child sexual abuse material applied to images produced entirely through AI.

In a statement Monday afternoon, the Justice Department said it has charged Steven Anderegg, 42, of Holmen, Wis., with using the AI image generator Stable Diffusion to create over 13,000 fake images of minors, many of which depicted fully or partially nude children touching their genitals or engaging in sexual intercourse with men.