London Police To Use AI To Search For Child Pornography

You might recall that back in 2016, Interpol announced that they would turning to the use of AI to help search for child pornography on the web, making it more efficient at trying to rid the internet of such content along with the people who distribute them. Now it looks like the UK’s Metropolitan Police also wants in on the tech as well.

The police have stated that they want to use AI to help identify videos and images on confiscated devices like computers and smartphones. As it stands, the police already have software that can help scan and recognize images such as guns, drugs, and money, but it seems that it isn’t quite as useful when it comes to nudity, which is what the police hope to have in the next 2-3 years.

Ultimately the goal is to help speed up the process of scanning devices, and there is also a benefit to the officers involved, as it could help them avoid seeing such disturbing images on a daily basis which could have some psychological trauma attached to them, according to Mark Stokes, the Met’s head of digital and electronics forensics, who spoke to The Telegraph.

According to Stokes, “We have to grade indecent images for different sentencing, and that has to be done by human beings right now, but machine learning takes that away from humans. You can imagine that doing that for year-on-year is very disturbing.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), Legal