Leading artificial intelligence companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and others have jointly pledged to prevent their AI tools from being used to exploit children and generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The initiative was led by child-safety group Thorn and All Tech Is Human, a non-profit focused on responsible tech.
The pledges from AI companies, Thorn said, “set a groundbreaking precedent for the industry and represent a significant leap in efforts to defend children from sexual abuse as a feature with generative AI unfolds.” The goal of the initiative is to prevent the creation of sexually explicit material involving children and take it off social media platforms and search engines. More than 104 million files of suspected child sexual abuse material were reported in the US in 2023 alone, Thorn says. In the absence of collective action, generative AI is poised to make this problem worse and overwhelm law enforcement agencies that are already struggling to identify genuine victims.
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.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-worlds-leading-ai-companies-pledge-to-protect-the-safety-of-children-online-213558797.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
The parents of a teenager who was killed in Florida’s Parkland school shooting in 2018 have started a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings through automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The project launched on Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voice of six children, some as young as ten, and young adults, who have lost their lives in incidents of gun violence across the US. Once you type in your zip code, The Shotline finds your local representative and lets you place an automated call from one of the six dead people in their own voice, urging for stronger gun control laws. “I’m back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you,” says the AI-generated voice of Joaquin Oliver, one of the teenagers killed in the Parkland shooting. “Other victims like me will be calling too.” At the time of publishing, more than 8,000 AI calls had been submitted to lawmakers through the website.
“This is a United States problem and we have not been able to fix it,” Oliver’s father Manuel, who started the project along with his wife Patricia, told the Journal. “If we need to use creepy stuff to fix it, welcome to the creepy.”
To recreate the voices, the Olivers used a voice cloning service from ElevenLabs, a two-year-old startup that recently raised $ 80 million in a round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Using just a few minutes of vocal samples, the software is able to recreate voices in more than two dozen languages. The Olivers reportedly used their son’s social media posts for his voice samples. Parents and legal guardians of gun violence victims can fill up a form to submit their voices to The Shotline to be added its repository of AI-generated voices.
The project raises ethical questions about using AI to generate deepfakes of voices belonging to dead people. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission declared that robocalls made using AI-generated voices were illegal, a decision that came weeks after voters in New Hampshire received calls impersonating President Joe Biden telling them to not vote in their state’s primary. An analysis by security company called Pindrop revealed that Biden’s audio deepfake was created using software from ElevenLabs.
The company’s co-founder Mati Staniszewski told the Journal that ElevenLabs allows people to recreate the voices of dead relatives if they have the rights and permissions. But so far, it’s not clear whether parents of minors had the rights to their children’s likenesses.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/their-children-were-shot-so-they-used-ai-to-recreate-their-voices-and-call-lawmakers-003832488.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
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