Artificial Intelligence

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – THE FUTURE OF FIGHTING CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE MATERIAL? Artificial Intelligence, AI, has started to play a prominent part in child sexual abuse investigations, by helping to recognise, categorise and triage material. This technology is currently mostly used by law enforcement, however industry is now developing AI to recognise online child sexual abuse material. In this series of blogs, we discuss technologies that are used to stop child sexual abuse. Unlike the tools we have previously covered, e.g. web crawlers and hashing technology, AI has the potential to identify new and previously unclassified child sexual abuse material. However, as always, it is not a fix-it-all solution. The sheer volume of material that is found after arrests is a major stumbling block to processing and identifying offenders and children. Data in the NetClean Report 2017 shows that a ‘normal’ case can contain anywhere between 50,000 to 5 million images, many of them images that do not contain child sexual abuse. Analysis and classification of this number of images is a major challenge for the human brain. Help to sort through and triage large quantities of data is vital.