KUALA LUMPUR: With the greater use of artificial intelligence (AI), it is becoming increasingly difficult for law enforcement to distinguish between genuine child sexual abuse cases and AI-generated ones, says Unicef chief of child protection Saskia Blume.
She said globally, AI is generating child sexual abuse material that appears more realistic.
Based on Unicef’s Disrupting Harm report, an estimated 100,000 Internet-using children aged 12-17 in Malaysia had experienced instances of online child sexual exploitation and abuse in 2022, she added.
“The number of children being affected and the material and videos being generated, are huge. Now with AI, the lines are blurred, especially when you have child sexual abuse material that involves a real child against the one used to spin off more and more material.
“So, you don’t know if the child is acutely in danger now versus the old material, so the risk of law enforcement being overwhelmed is really high.
“AI should be used by law enforcement to go through 100,000 pieces of such material in Malaysia, as it is huge,” she told The Star at the International Symposium on the Empowerment of the Children’s Commission here yesterday.
Unicef child protection specialist Sivaselvi Supramaniam said industry players can play a role by helping detect Child Sexual Exploitation Material (CSEM).
Citing the “Safety by Design” proactive and preventative approach that focuses on embedding safety used by the eSafety Commissioner in Australia, she said it is important to start looking at prevention.
“How can the industry play a role to detect and remove CSEM? Through Safety by Design, for example, technology companies can minimise online threats by anticipating, detecting and eliminating online harm before it occurs.
“This means at the manufacturing stage of the phone, there are already tools to prevent CSEM from reaching the user.
“We need to start looking at prevention because the way the Internet works and how chatbots generate images is too fast.
“We can never keep up so we need to continue to block (harmful) images, we need to look at how we can prevent such images from reaching users,” she added.
Children’s Commissioner Dr Farah Nini Dusuki said there is much danger to children who have been given access to gadgets for the sake of convenience.
She said parents still need to communicate about taboo topics as their children are vulnerable to being exploited.
“I think Malaysian children are very much vulnerable because there is a lack of communication... between parents and children.
“How much do parents know about the dangers lurking online, especially with exploitation, and the tools to monitor as well as prevent their children from becoming victims?
“I think awareness among parents is still very low,” she added.
