Last month, Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center published a report claiming it found more than 1,000 illegal images depicting child sexual abuse in an open-source database used to train popular image-generation tools. 

Fortune magazine reported on this scandal, as well as the proliferation of other artificial intelligence misuse. University of Michigan School of Information lecturer Merve Hickok, an expert on AI ethics, policy and governance, says these are the consequences of releasing these models without safety measures. 

“It was a matter of time,” Hickok says. “We opened the floodgates at this time last year, when one company after another released their models without safeguards in place, and the consequence of that race to market—we will have that for a very long time.” 

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Learn more about Hickok’s research on artificial intelligence and ethics by visiting her UMSI faculty profile. 

Read “A widely used AI image training database contained explicit pictures of children. Experts warn that’s just the tip of the iceberg” on Fortune.