Although they haven't yet been written, it sounds as if new laws are on the way to criminalise possession. This time they are targetting the AI tools used to create images, which will be difficult because those tools are widely available and they are used to create other things as well.

When it comes to deepfakes, the law changes originally included soliciting deepfake images, but now it seems to be expanding to include the technology itself. But as with all these things, it still takes some user input to create something illegal. Photoshop for example, could turn an innocent photo of a child into an illegal image, so will possession of photoshop become a crime?

Presumably the prosecution would need to show that the AI could only produce illegal images and nothing else. Otherwise, all sorts of law abiding users could potentially be arrested. Alternatively they could just focus on the demand issue and that's where an offence of soliciting images makes sense because unlike possession, it connects the viewer of the image to the person creating it.