UK Cops Want to Use AI to Spot Child Abuse But It Mistakes Desert Pics for Nudes
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/19/met-orders-review...
To begin with, the way image recognition algorithms work -they learn from examples- to train an image recognition AI to identify images of child abuse you'd have to provide it with a substantial database of such images. I'm pretty sure that's illegal, although of course the Met probably has some sort of exception for the purpose of fighting crime. But, they still have to keep around a big database of child abuse images - and update it regularly, to do this job. It's kind of... icky.
Then again, what about victim protection? Besides the fact that keeping such a database is risky because it can always fall into the wrong hands (it only takes one misconfigured database server) it's also a characteristic of the most advanced image recognition algorithms (conv-nets) that their models can be used to generate new images of the kind they've learned to identify. So presumably, if the model itself fell into the wrong hands, someone could start generating new child-abuse images from it (low-fidelity and not really very useful, I imagine, but still).
So I wonder if the Met has addressed such ethical issues, anywhere.
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem (from their perspective) because feds/cops already deal with this all the time and plant this on people like drugs.
Law enforcement does collect images that have been traded. They do not use these to frame people, unless you are referring to the honeypot sites that they have taken over. They maintain these sites hoping that CP collectors will continue to download images of their own volition and that they can they trace the IPs to a real-world address.
There are many many many lesser known individuals that are hushed up using child porn.
Citation needed. This would the first I've heard of CP being used to frame people by law enforcement. It happens, though very rarely, that some people try to frame innocent individuals...
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem (from their perspective) because feds/cops already deal with this all the time and plant this on people like drugs.
So I'm basically saying there is no ethical problem because feds/cops already deal with this all the time, but they don't frame people. They let the idiots hang themselves. And by the way, my source is that I used to defend people like this when I was a public defender. What's your source?
As far as generating new kiddie porn, before there were ML models, there was Photoshop, and that first released in the 90's. That there are more advanced methods of generating child pornography is not interesting or new under the law (depending on your jurisdiction).
"Fun" fact: Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat have giant repositories of (tagged!) child pornography however before we get our pitchforks out, it's used to keep child pornography out of the system.
Unfortunately with current technology there's not really a realistic way around having the actual images; hashing only goes so far, and just like (performant) homomorphic encryption, if you were able to come up with a way to do this without actually needing the pictures, the world will beat a path to your door.
IIRC, they already do this, for tracking the distribution and source of such images.
> It's kind of... icky.
No disagreement there.
> their models can be used to generate new images of the kind
Tools like Photoshop can already do this, and likely to a higher quality than running a conv. net in reverse (so to speak), so I doubt that's a big concern.
(A) (B)
1. elbow, ass;
2. ass, elbow;
3. ass, ass;
4. elbow, elbow;
5. ass, ass;
6. ass, elbow;
7. ass, elbow;As such i am unsure if this "AI" is failing or has become all too human.
There are requirements in the DEA 2017 for 'adult' websites to verify the age of people who visit the site with the threat of their website being blocked if they don't comply. Check openrightsgroup.org for more on this
This is people who're being investigated for possessing images of child sexual abuse. This might be because they've accessed a website known to distribute such images; or they've created imags of a child which were found.
Police need to search all the devices that person owns in order to find all the images. They need to do this to protect children who are still being abused; to detect unknown abusers; to add images to the various IWF etc lists; and to ensure the correct prosecution and sentencing approach is taken.
He then lied about what the police had done.
That's not a vendetta, that's holding people to account.
The computer was searched as part of a separate investigation (into leaks) which found nothing.
The pornography was not extreme.
I'm really skeptical of politicians that want to ban "extreme pornography" on the Internet yet let actual prostitution just kind of, slide under the radar.
Surprisingly not many Brits are aware that you can get a couple of high end hookers who will do anything for a few hundred quid per hour, and it's legal. Lots of these "escorts" are barely legal age, as well.
Maybe it's a ploy to get people off porn and into actual sex lol.
According to Section 63(2) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008:
An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both—
(a) pornographic, and
(b) an extreme image.
At least, though, in subsection 7 and 7A they define "extreme", as well as providing a nice catch-all of "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character":
(7) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following—
(a) an act which threatens a person's life,
(b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or
(d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive),
and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real.
(7A) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, either of the following—
(a) an act which involves the non-consensual penetration of a person's vagina, anus or mouth by another with the other person's penis, or
(b) an act which involves the non-consensual sexual penetration of a person's vagina or anus by another with a part of the other person's body or anything else,
and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that the persons were real.Edit - Also even the police have stated that there was nothing illegal found.
Additionally he was in opposition not in government at the time of the raid.
Edit again: in the UK as you should well know one is expected to provide evidence along with defamatory statements. Do you have any evidence?
So now, guess what, the same police and BBC have transformed to be holier than thou organisations free to cast judgement on anyone they don't like because this will absolve them of any guilt regarding past failures (obviously).
If the goal is to get something so high quality that the police won't ever have to look at it, I doubt it. You have Google and Facebook employing people to deal with user reports about this stuff, as well as ad companies manually checking websites.
What they will be able to do with that software is trawl through orders of magnitudes more pictures, filter by probable hits and show those to staff. Right now someone has to be suspected to warrant the expensive attention of an expert. With that software you can fish in everyone's data.
The advantage of an algo detecting illegal content isn't in protecting civil servants, it's scanning everyone without them.
Edit: awful typo "lol" -> "look"
And then there's the classic Weston photograph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_No._30
(Edit, IOW, not a new problem, photographers have been pushing at this sort of issue for a long time)
There might be work arounds (like training one model for nudity and another for age) but such approaches are almost certain to have "suboptimal" performance as compared to a single model trained on a relevant dataset. Maybe something like that is the cause for the performance issues discussed in the article.
This still leaves the obvious legal problems of having a database of illegal pictures, but we already let law enforcement do otherwise illegal things (including use of illegal pictures in some contexts)
The biggest problem with obscenity detection, though, is getting the context right. The AI might be able to get to the point where it can detect "naked human" at a good percentage level. At the moment, however, I doubt it could detect whether the naked human was considered obscene in current culture, eg: the difference between "child pornography" and "famous Vietnam War photo" as alluded to in the Gizmodo article. So no matter how good their model gets, without further refinements in AI it would only be good for a "first pass", I would think.
AI requires large image sets to do the training. These images are illegal to possess. I wonder how such training gets done without violating the law. However, I do not wonder enough to do web searches about this matter. I am probably on enough government lists already
The "problem" here is probably not the lack of negative training data, but just that they want as few false negatives as possible, so they use a very sensitive model. That naturally increases the number of false positives. It's still a win if you only have to look at some desert pictures instead of literally every picture on someone's computer.
That is accurate for virtually all pornography. If you research how the "industry" works, you will quickly discover that it's built on advanced psychology, specifically hypnosis, torture, culture of fear and other brainwashing techniques.
The porn cult is every bit as vicious, evil and destructive to women as any cult you can name.
> calling porn a "cult" seems like a stretch
That is the general perception, but as I said initially, girls are indoctrinated and trained using advanced psychological manipulation, indistinguishable from what most people think a "cult" is.
Everyone is free to believe that massive numbers of young girls just absolutely love the taste of cum, rimming, and so on. Nothing fishy is going on...
Or they could be, you know, acting.
Yes, precisely like Tom Cruise is just an actor. Let's forget about the scientology thing.
Should spot the 99% of cases.