Google has released a free artificial intelligence tool that will help the company identify child sexual abuse material, foreign media reported. The software assists human scrutiny by ranking high-priority cases.

Stamping out the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a top priority for big Internet companies. But it’s also hard and painful work for those on the front lines — they have to identify and remove the content. That’s why Google has released free artificial intelligence software designed to help these people.

Currently, most technological solutions in this field are achieved by examining images and videos against catalogs of previously identified sexual abuse material. (See PhotoDNA, a tool developed by Microsoft and deployed by companies such as Facebook and Twitter.) The software, known as “crawlers,” is an effective way of preventing people from sharing known, previously identified CSams. But it cannot identify material that has not already been marked illegal. For this, humans must censor the content themselves.

This is where Google’s new AI tool will help: it draws on Google’s expertise in machine vision to assist humans by sorting tagged images and videos and “prioritizing the most likely CSAM content for review.” In this way, staff will be able to improve the efficiency of the review.

Google said that in one trial, the AI tool helped humans “take more than 700 percent of CSAM content over the same time period.”

Fred Langford, deputy CEO of The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), told The Verge that The software would make it more efficient for humans to censor sexual abuse material.

The IWF, one of the largest groups working to stop CSAM spreading online, is based in the UK and funded by major international technology companies including Google. It employs a number of people to identify images of sexual abuse and operates tip lines in more than a dozen countries for Internet users to report suspicious material. It also conducts its own investigations and works with law enforcement to shut down sites that share CSAM.

Langford said the IWF will thoroughly test Google’s new AI tool to see how it performs and how it assists humans in their work, because of the nature of “ai having a lot of mind-boggling capabilities.” He added that tools like this are a step toward fully automated systems that can identify previously undiscovered materials without human involvement at all. This classifier is kind of the holy grail of our field.

“A few years ago, I would have said this kind of classifier was five or six years away,” Langford said. “But now I think we’re only a year or two away from creating something fully automated in some cases.”

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