HAPPENING AT THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
The phenomenon is constantly growing and simply overwhelms the response capabilities of law enforcement agencies. Tens of thousands of crimes are committed online every year, linked to paedophilia or child pornography. There is no way to report them all, to track them, to avoid them. We must prevent them. This is according to the experts: the imbalance between the number of people looking for victims and the number of agents trying to hinder them cannot be "humanly" filled. We must therefore go beyond the human, and this is now possible thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).
ChatGPT, Bard, and the myriad of related features already exist. More are soon to come. Fighting them is useless, we have already had the experience of Luddism and we know how it ends. What you can do is use things, regulate them and try to make the best of them. Then there will always be someone who abuses it, but this also happens for bread knives, hoes, pens, cars, computers or antidepressants. And so, precisely to make the best use of what we have available, the European Union has financed the development of an application, Salus, which thanks to AI should be able, once developed, to identify child pornography images and videos, blocking them in real time. As always, there is a need to train the system to recognize violent content, but the process is already underway. One hundred and eighty users are testing the app in five countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. The process will last several months.
But to understand exactly what people attracted to child pornography are looking for online, you need to know them well, scientifically define their tendencies, study the phenomenon in depth, perhaps for years, or ask them directly. And it is this path that has been chosen. The project foresees a second phase in which volunteers will be involved who have searched for child pornography on the web in the past. These people will be chosen by associations, such as the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which organize initiatives of assistance for paedophiles who wish to abandon that world. Among them there may also be individuals convicted of child abuse who have embarked on a journey of recovery.
Donald Findlater, one of the experts leading the program, explained that tools such as the new App represent «a practical aid for people who recognize a vulnerability in themselves» and wish to overcome it. Furthermore, those who have already found child pornography online are certainly more capable than others of finding flaws in artificial intelligence and of carrying out accurate tests to prevent free zones from remaining on the deep web where the sexual commodification of minors can continue.
Two birds with one stone: fighting paedophilia and helping those who wish to free themselves from that condition. Artificial intelligence is a very powerful tool, but like all others it depends on the use that man is able to make of it. We shall have to get used to it.
