A former vendor who stocked drink machines in Gilmer County Schools was sentenced to 40 years in prison Wednesday after authorities said they discovered a trove of child sex abuse material that he generated by running normal photographs of the victims through artificial intelligence programs.
Ronald Richardson was convicted last month on 118 counts of sexual exploitation of children, court records show. The images and videos uncovered by prosecutors included sexual abuse content of more than 150 victims, many of whom were identified as students in Gilmer County, prosecutors said.
Nineteen victims gave impact statements at the sentencing hearing in Ellijay, according to the DeKalb County District Attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case at the request of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.
The investigation into Richardson, 49, began in December 2024 when a Gilmer High School student told a school resource officer the vendor had asked her to send him pictures of herself through social media, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported. Investigators testified he used secretly recorded photos and videos of students and also pulled from social media pages to create sexual content using AI, the AJC reported.
The criminal case was tried in Gilmer before Cobb County Judge G. Grant Brantley, who rendered the guilty verdict after Richardson waived a jury trial. The maximum sentence he faced was over 2,000 years in prison — up to 20 years per count, according to the DA’s office.
Brantley agreed with the prosecutor’s recommended sentence of 60 years: 40 in custody and the rest on probation, according to the DA’s office. Richardson must also register as a sex offender upon his release.
An attorney for Richardson could not be reached Wednesday after the sentencing.
The victims depicted in the material ranged in age from 11 to 50, though the majority were high school girls from Gilmer County, where Richardson also lives, the AJC has reported.
AI-generated sexual content is a rapidly growing concern across the country, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The organization has a “CyberTipline” for reports of child sexual exploitation. Of the reports submitted between January 2023 and December 2025, its staff “categorized more than 158,000 images and videos” as AI-generated, its website says.
Some of the Georgia victims filed a lawsuit against Richardson and PepsiCo Inc. That civil case is still pending. Pepsi did not respond to a request for comment on that pending litigation Wednesday.
Caroline McGlamry, an attorney representing some of the victims in the civil suit, told the AJC she and the victims are glad the judge took the charges seriously, “particularly in light of the use of AI and the creation of CSAM, and how it’s rapidly becoming a major issue.”
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