A soldier stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage was arrested Friday on federal charges accusing him of using artificial intelligence to generate explicit materials and storing tens of thousands of additional images depicting child sexual abuse on multiple cellphones.
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Spc. Seth Herrera, a 34-year-old soldier, was indicted Aug. 22 on charges of transportation of child pornography, receipt of child pornography and possession of child pornography. Herrera entered not guilty pleas to all three charges during his first court appearance at the federal courthouse in Anchorage on Tuesday. He said very little and kept his eyes down as the charges against him were read aloud.
Herrera is a heavy vehicle driver assigned to the 17th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion within the 11th Airborne Division based at JBER, according to John Pennell, a spokesman for the unit. Herrera remains an active-duty soldier, Pennell wrote in an email.
The investigation began in July, according to Alaska State Troopers, who assisted with Herrera’s arrest last week. Since then, he’s remained in custody at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
Investigators connected Herrera to the explicit material when he tried to access a link showing the sexual abuse of two girls, prosecutors wrote in a detention memorandum.
Homeland Security investigators executed a search warrant at his home on base and found three phones containing “tens of thousands of videos and images” depicting violent sexual acts against children as young as infants, the memorandum said. Herrera also used encrypted messaging apps and created his own group to receive and store child sexual abuse images, it said.
In court, federal prosecutor Rachel Rothberg detailed what she described as Herrera’s prolific online activity related to accessing, generating and hiding child sex abuse materials to argue that he should not be released from jail under any pre-trial conditions.
“Mr. Herrera presents a danger to the community,” Rothberg said.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Kyle F. Reardon denied Herrera’s release to a supervised facility, as requested by his public defender.
“The court is disturbed by the allegations in this case,” Reardon said, noting that Herrera appeared highly sophisticated at masking his acquisition of illegal digital material. “I am going to order him detained as a danger to the community.”
Because of his position with the military, Herrera was frequently in contact with children, including at his fourplex on base, and had access to military families and their children while driving supplies from Anchorage to Fairbanks, according to the memorandum.
Filings in the case make no specific reference to children from Alaska. Officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage did not respond to a request for information Tuesday.
Herrera joined the Army in 2019 and moved to Alaska last year, according to Pennell. He was previously stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma; at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; at Fort Bliss, Texas; and in South Korea.
According to prosecutors, Herrera had been storing child sexual abuse material to devices for at least 3 1/2 years, since 2021.
He also secretly made recordings of children he knew in 2022 and 2023 at locations outside of Alaska, according to the memorandum. Herrera used a home security system camera and then employed an artificial intelligence program to transform the images into materials depicting child sex abuse, it said. He is also accused of collecting photos and videos of minors from their social media and using them to generate sexual content.
“The Defendant used various web-based software to create morphed child pornography and other child exploitative material — taking innocent pictures of minors known to him and running them through an AI chatbot to undress or add pornographic bodies,” prosecutors wrote.
AI software can combine real photos of people with sexually explicit materials to make realistic content sometimes referred to as deepfakes. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement that misuse of generative AI “is accelerating the proliferation of dangerous content, including child sexual abuse material.”
The influx of AI-generated images could make it more challenging for authorities to distinguish cases where children are in need of rescue, according to a Stanford Internet Observatory report.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in March released a public service announcement warning that “realistic computer-generated images” of child sexual abuse are illegal. Several other cases involving generative AI images have resulted in arrests in other areas of the country. A child psychiatrist in North Carolina received a 40-year prison sentence and a registered sex offender in Pennsylvania was sentenced to spend more than 14 years in prison for possessing deepfake images of child sexual abuse.
Investigators asked anyone with information about Herrera’s actions or who may have encountered someone in person or online using his name to contact the Department of Homeland Security Investigations tip line at 1-877-447-4847.