Former El Pasoan Seth Herrera is accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to create child pornography images of El Paso children beginning in 2021, according to the federal indictment issued against him on Wednesday. Herrera was originally arrested on child pornography charges on August 23, 2024, while stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage Alaska. He was indicted on August 22, 2024, with transporting child pornography and plead not guilty on August 27 to the Alaska charges. However, a new indictment was issued in El Paso accusing him of taking photographs and videos of children visiting his El Paso home.
The Alaska indictment against Herrera alleges that starting around 2021, Herrera would surreptitiously take photographs and videos of children undressing at his home. The indictment alleges that Herrera used encrypted software and artificial intelligence chatbots to create child pornography based on the images he took of children. The El Paso indictment adds that at least some of the images were taken in El Paso. The images used to create the child pornography were images and videos taken of “minors undressing in his home.”
The El Paso Indictment
On Wednesday, Herrera was indicted in El Paso on charges related to the sexual exploitation of children from March 7, 2021 through August 6, 2023.
The El Paso indictment lists three Samsung telephones belonging to Herrera. One is a Galaxy S21 Ultra, the second device is a Galaxy S23 Ultra and third device is listed as a Galaxy S8+. All three devices were used in a commission of a crime, according to the notice of forfeiture attached to the El Paso indictment.
The original indictment against Herrera filed in Alaska alleges that Hererra possessed “tens of thousands of videos and images depicting” the abuse of children “as young as infants.”
In addition to the seriousness of the crime he is alleged to have committed, the government lawyers cited that he “poses a serious risk to his minor daughter,” in the Memorandum In Support Of Pretrial Detention on August 23, 2024.
Herrera joined the US Army in 2019. According to the court documents, he started collecting child pornography on his devices around March 2021 when he was living in El Paso. Sometime in 2023, Hererra was stationed in Alaska. On July 2024, The Alaska Bureau of Investigation Technical Crime Unit and the US Department of Homeland Security began investigating Herrera, according to a press release issued by the Alaska investigators after his arrest.
Dear reader, I hope you appreciate this article. Before reading more, I ask that you consider my work and make a small donation to help keep this publication open for everyone. El Paso lacks news diversity. I offer 20+ years of historical knowledge about El Paso’s politics and public policy. Media diversity matters. Make a small donation today to help keep my work going for another 20+ years. Thank you.
Herrera is charged with transporting and possessing child pornography in Alaska while the El Paso indictment alleges that he took pictures of minors at his home.
Herrera had been previously stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and South Korea, in addition to Fort Bliss before being stationed in Alaska.
The Rise of AI In Child Pornography
Child Sexual Abuse Material, or CSAM, has seen a rise with the abuse of AI tools in recent years. A July 2024 Internet Watch Foundation report investigating the use of AI in creating child pornography found that AI generated CSAM began to appear online around March 2023. By February 2024, 60 reports of CSAM content generated by AI tools were found in the open web.
Feeding the rise on online child pornography is the use of so-called “nudifying” online software that allows users to upload the picture of a clothed individual and get back an AI interpreted image of the individual without clothes.
Herrera, according to the court documents is well versed in using the AI tools to create the criminal images, some of which used the pictures and videos of children he took in El Paso as the bases for generating the child pornography found on his devices and likely shared online.
Likely the first the case of criminal charges for AI images is the November 2024 criminal case against Meillo Schneider who faces seven counts of possessing computer-generated child pornography. Schneider was booked into the Fond Du Lac Wisconsin County Jail on November 8, 2024 and remains there according to the jail’s online records. He pleaded not guilty to the nine charges of possessing “virtual child pornography” in February. Over 13,000 files were found on Amazon storage services belonging to Schneider. Schneider is charged under a Wisconsin law making it illegal to access or create virtual child pornography.
On April 23, 2025, Daniel Joseph Broadway pleaded guilty in North Carolina to crimes related to AI-generated child pornography. Broadway was arrested on December 12, 2023. Broadway admitted to accessing and possessing criminal images, unlike Herrera who allegedly used pictures he took of children in El Paso to create child pornography.
A sentencing date for Broadway has not been set. Herrera has pleaded not guilty to the Alaska charges. No trial date has been set for either the Alaska or El Paso charges for Herrera.