Prominent artificial intelligence firms, such as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and others, have collectively committed to preventing the exploitation of children and the creation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) through the use of their AI technologies. Leading the project were the non-profit organization All Tech Is Human, which focuses on ethical tech, and the kid safety group Thorn.
According to Thorn, the promises made by AI firms “represent a significant leap in efforts to defend children from sexual abuse as a feature with generative AI unfolds” and “set a groundbreaking precedent for the industry.” The effort aims to stop the production of sexually explicit content featuring children and remove it from search engines and social media platforms. According to Thorn, in the US alone, more than 104 million files containing content suspected of child sexual abuse were reported in 2023. Generative AI has the potential to exacerbate this issue and burden law enforcement organizations, which are already having difficulty identifying real victims, if no coordinated action is taken.
On Tuesday, Thorn and All Tech Is Human released a new paper titled “Safety by Design for Generative AI: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse” that outlines strategies and lays out recommendations for companies that build AI tools, search engines, social media platforms, hosting companies and developers to take steps to prevent generative AI from being used to harm children.
One of the recommendations, for instance, asks companies to choose data sets used to train AI models carefully and avoid ones only only containing instances of CSAM but also adult sexual content altogether because of generative AI’s propensity to combine the two concepts. Thorn is also asking social media platforms and search engines to remove links to websites and apps that let people “nudity” images of children, thus creating new AI-generated child sexual abuse material online. A flood of AI-generated CSAM, according to the paper, will make identifying genuine victims of child sexual abuse more difficult by increasing the “haystack problem” — an reference to the amount of content that law enforcement agencies must current sift through.
“This project was intended to make abundantly clear that you don’t need to throw up your hands,” Thorn’s vice president of data science Rebecca Portnoff told the Wall Street Journal. “We want to be able to change the course of this technology to where the existing harms of this technology get cut off at the knees.”
Some companies, Portnoff said, had already agreed to separate images, video and audio that involved children from data sets containing adult content to prevent their models from combining the two. Others also add watermarks to identify AI-generated content, but the method isn’t foolproof — watermarks and metadata can be easily removed.
