Palm Coast Resident Arrested For Generating Child Sexual Abuse Material Using Artificial Intelligence

Robert Ezra Lamb, a 38-year-old resident of 3 Fortress Court in Palm Coast and a felon from a drug conviction two years ago, is being held at the Flagler County jail on $50,000 bond following his arrest on five felony counts of generating and possessing child sexual abuse materials, an increasing type of crime since the rapid proliferation and accessibility of artificial intelligence.

The investigation began 13 months ago when the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office received a cybertip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. NCMEC had itself been tipped off by the parent company of Onlyfans, the London-based social media platform with 380 million users that allows users to profit from the often sexually explicit content they produce.

The tip pointed to Lamb’s Onlyfans account, which included his home address, his email address and his IP address. Onlyfans sent five images to NCMEC, believing them to be illicit material.

The images appeared to be fabrications using AI. In one, according to Lamb’s arrest report, a prepubescent “girl” is depicted fully nude on a balcony overlooking a beach, making a peace sign. Her body has been altered to appear more adult. making a peace sign. “The facial features, body size, and proportions are all that of a prepubescent female, despite the digitally altered breasts,” the report states.

The four other images follow similar patterns and all appear to have been generated by AI, which uses actual images to “educate” itself in order to produce material on demand.

Lamb had added a watermark-like signature on each image pointing to his Onlyfans account, and made the images publicly available. In June, Sheriff’s Detective Detective Joe O’Barr obtained a search warrant for the Lamb Onlyfans account. The company issued the data on Oct. 6. The data included chat messages between Lamb and others as well as “numerous videos” where he was engaging in sexual acts, by himself or with others–none of it apparently illegal.

Other data included innocuous elements such as his profile picture, digitally altered to give himself blue eyes, and credit card information used to keep current with his account. He had also placed an image of his face on the body of a woman in an image featuring three people (who he later told detectives were his siblings). Included in the overall data were the five images similar to those that triggered the cybertip.

But one image “depicted the same prepubescent female juvenile victim wearing a pink bikini,” the report states. “Image five depicted the same pubescent female juvenile victim standing in front of a car, however, she was wearing a black high collar top and a denim skirt. These unaltered images confirmed Detective O’Barr’s original belief that Lamb used an AI program to convert images to CSAM.”

Detectives interviewed Lamb at his home on Feb. 20. He confirmed technical details about his Onlyfans account, and that he’d sent certain videos of himself in various acts. He said he’d received three of the images from someone else, but he couldn’t explain how he’d obtained their unedited versions.

“Lamb confessed to creating images two and four, which he stated the child victim in these images was known to him, and was his ex-girlfriend[‘s] daughter, whom Lamb believed to be between the ages of 6-7 at the time the original photos were taken,” the report states. “Lamb stated he used an ai app to ‘remove the clothes’” before distributing the images to the same person who’d sent him the other three.

Lamb faces five third-degree felony charges of generating CSAM.

Last month the Internet Watch Foundation, a British nonprofit that, like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, investigates child sexual abuse imagery, warned that AI is becoming a “child sexual abuse machine,” seeing a “frightening” 26,362 percent rise in “photo-realistic AI videos of child sexual abuse, often including real and recognisable child victims. In 2025, the IWF discovered 3,440 AI videos of child sexual abuse compared to only 13 in 2024.”

“This material,” IWF reported, “can now be made at scale by criminals with minimal technical knowledge, and can have harmful effects on children whose likenesses are coopted into the imagery, as well as further normalising sexual violence against children and undermining efforts to create an internet free of child sexual abuse and exploitation. Analysts believe offenders are using the technology in greater numbers as the sophistication of AI video tools improves.”

In 2025, IWF recorded 312,030 reports of CSAM, compared to 291,730 reports in 2024, leading the New York Times to report that  “ A new flood of child sexual abuse material created by artificial intelligence is hitting a tipping point of realism, threatening to overwhelm the authorities.”

Last July, the New York Times reported that since April 2025, FCSO has served as a member of NEFL INTERCEPT, a regional task force focused on combating child exploitation and human trafficking.