Inside AI-powered fight against digital sex crimes

The language of sexual predators grooming potential victims may look harmless. But spotting their patterns is necessary for protecting underage internet users. “A teenager posts a short video and receives comments such as ‘You’re pretty’ or ‘How old are you?’ These may seem like harmless compliments or signs of interest. But when they are used to build trust and steer the child toward private contact, they can mark the beginning of online grooming,” an official from the National Center for Digital Sexual Crime Response said during a demonstration for reporters Tuesday. Detecting predators' pattern is the next challenge for the center, where artificial intelligence (AI) has already improved its capacity to detect suspected child sexual exploitation material and streamlined the process of requesting its removal. “Because the individual words are not inherently suspicious, keyword searches alone cannot detect the pattern," the official said. "That is why we’re now developing technology that looks beyond isolated words to examine how an exchange unfolds and identify attemp