Ryan Sherman, the postmaster for Seaside, was in federal court Wednesday afternoon, accused of possessing thousands of images and videos of child sexual abuse and of creating his own such images using artificial intelligence.
The FBI arrested Sherman, 36, a day earlier after obtaining search warrants earlier this month for three of his cell phones and a storage drive, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Natasha M. Geiling.
Sherman is accused of taking “seemingly innocuous photographs of children” and using AI to turn them into obscene images, Geiling wrote in a court memo.
The federal investigation into Sherman followed an initial inquiry by Seaside police in late 2025 after a report by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children referred to the use of an IP address, later linked to Sherman, to upload and share images of child sex abuse, the memo said.
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