SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF OHIO — James Strahler, 37, pleaded guilty in federal court in the Southern District of Ohio to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse, and publication of digital forgeries, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The case marked the first conviction under the federal Take It Down Act of 2025.

Strahler used over 100 AI web-based models on his phone to create more than 700 illicit images, according to the Justice Department. He posted those images to a website dedicated to child sexual abuse material.

The investigation began after one of Strahler's adult victims reported receiving threatening and harassing messages, according to court records. Strahler admitted to making the violent calls and texts. Investigators extracted information from his seized phone, which revealed additional victims and the extent of his AI-generated abuse.

Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher at Bellingcat who specializes in AI technology, said the low barrier to creating such content has complicated efforts to address it. "Nowadays, you can even go to a web domain and put in a prompt, and you have to have very little technical knowledge to be able to start creating the content. This poses a huge challenge because there's just an overwhelming amount of content," Koltai said. "Nowadays, with a dollar or sometimes even cheaper, you can take a photo of anyone on the internet and put it into a 'nudifier' or some sort of AI-generation platform and create a convincing new image even based on that person's face," she added.

Matthew Faranda-Diedrich, an attorney who has handled cases dealing with deepfaked nudes, said AI's transition from an obscure to a mainstream technology occurred faster than laws could adapt to address its abuses. He works closely with police to help them understand the technology and support investigations into potentially illegal behavior.

Law enforcement officers and civilians often face a learning curve in understanding how sophisticated AI applications have become at manipulating images. "They'll think back to when they were younger or other generations and say, 'Oh, this is like Photoshop,' and have this idea in their head that you can easily tell that the doctored image is fake. In fact, the images produced by the 'nudify' apps look very real and are nothing like a Photoshopped image," Faranda-Diedrich said.

In most cases he has handled, both victims and perpetrators were children aged 14 to 16. "Let's call it what it is: it's child pornography," he said.