Google Launches AI Solution to Spot Child Sex Abuse Content

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 6:28PM EST · Published Sep 4, 6:25AM EDT

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Google Launches AI Solution to Spot Child Sex Abuse Content — © Noah_Loverbear / Wikimedia Commons

Among the most heinous of online activities, child sex abuse content has to be at or near the top. Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google has released an artificial intelligence solution to help combat it. While the fix is not complete, it does offer help to stop the overwhelming and serious problem.

Google Europe’s Nikola Todorovic, Engineering Lead, and Abhi Chaudhuri, Product Manager, wrote in a blog post:

Using the internet as a means to spread content that sexually exploits children is one of the worst abuses imaginable. That’s why since the early 2000s we’ve been investing in technology, teams, and working closely with expert organizations, like the Internet Watch Foundation, to fight the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online. There are also many other organizations of all sizes that are deeply committed to this fight—from civil society groups and specialist NGOs [non-government organizations] to other technology companies—and we all work to ensure we share the latest technological advancements.

Today we’re introducing the next step in this fight: cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) that significantly advances our existing technologies to dramatically improve how service providers, NGOs, and other technology companies review this content at scale. By using deep neural networks for image processing, we can now assist reviewers sorting through many images by prioritizing the most likely CSAM content for review. While historical approaches to finding this content have relied exclusively on matching against hashes of known CSAM, the classifier keeps up with offenders by also targeting content that has not been previously confirmed as CSAM. Quick identification of new images means that children who are being sexually abused today are much more likely to be identified and protected from further abuse.

Because the program still requires human review, it cannot stamp out the child sexual abuse problem, but it can certainly help.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.