Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jessica Terkovich Publishes Research on Evolution, Preparedness of Criminal Laws in Advent of AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material

NORFOLK, Va. — The Office of the Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney extends its congratulations to Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney II Jessica L. Terkovich, whose research entitled “The Emerging Danger of AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material and an Unprepared Criminal Code” was published in the Summer 2025 issue of the Northern Illinois University Law Review. In her research, Ms. Terkovich asserts that laws criminalizing the production of child sexual abuse material (CSAM; referred to under most criminal codes as “child pornography”) should be amended or otherwise updated to encompass such material generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

As part of her study, Ms. Terkovich reviewed current laws against CSAM in all 50 states, in judicial precedents, and in criminal codes of other countries, and she assessed whether those laws included provisions regarding AI-altered and AI-generated CSAM. Ms. Terkovich argued that — with capabilities including superimposing one person’s likeness over another’s on an already existing image and creating synthetic videos (commonly referred to as “deepfakes”) using real or fictional people — generative AI tools have emerged as media to produce harmful content like CSAM and fuel the dark web marketplace of CSAM. Furthermore, Ms. Terkovich addressed the advent of AI search engines that, with simple keyword prompts, can produce CSAM that often goes unregulated and unreported by the search engines’ parent companies. Given the potential for abuse, Ms. Terkovich stated that “we must reanalyze the current state of the law in order to better protect our children” and ensure that sexual content involving children and their likenesses are prosecutable in courts regardless of their origin.

This is the third published law review article written by Ms. Terkovich. Ms. Terkovich is the co-author, with Frank D. LoMonte, of “‘Twitter Jail’ for the Jailer: The Precarious First Amendment Rights of Police Officers to Share Workplace Concerns on Social Media” (published in the University of Nevada Law Journal in April 2024) and the author of “Living with the Dying: Visitation Rights of Children Whose Parents Have Been Condemned to Death” (published in the University of Arkansas Little Rock Journal of Social Change and Public Service in November 2023).

Ms. Terkovich, 27, graduated from the University of Florida in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology and from the university’s Fredric G. Levin College of Law in 2022. Before her third year of law school, Ms. Terkovich joined the Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office as an intern in the summer of 2021, and she returned to Florida but continued gaining prosecutorial experience with the Office as an extern until her graduation in May 2022. Ms. Terkovich returned to the Office as a legal fellow in the summer of 2022 as she awaited her Virginia Bar exam results and, after receiving her law license, joined the Office’s First Precinct Team as an entry-level prosecutor in October 2022. Ms. Terkovich now serves the Office’s Juvenile and Domestic Relations Team and was promoted to the rank of Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney II in June 2024.

“Congratulations to Jess Terkovich for her important legal scholarship. It is no small thing for a law professor to be a published law-review author. For Jess, a young prosecutor with a heavy docket of serious cases, to do so is impressive,” said Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi. “The 40 lawyers and 45 staff of our Office contribute to the life of our community in myriad ways beyond the cases we try, whether as legal scholars, as mentors to young people, as coaches, or as college teachers. I am proud that we recruit and retain the best of the best lawyers and staff — people like Jess — to Norfolk to do this important work.”

Ms. Terkovich embodies the spirit of research-based criminal justice reform, and the Office thanks her for her scholarship and continued service. Her full article can be accessed by clicking here.

###