Protecting minors from NSFW AI is an urgent, still confused affair. In 2023, more than 60% of U.S. teens engaged with the internet regularly (I have those numbers somewhere!), so reliable and trustworthy cyber safety must be delivered to protect them from inappropriate online content. There are algorithms created to detect and filter out illegal or harmful content, and the amount of AI monitoring online material has grown distinctly. The systems are designed to detect explicit content at an accuracy rate greater than 95%, making them a powerful tool for the protection of minors against certain online hazards.
NSFW AI works by looking at the images, videos or text and figuring out if what it sees is NSFW(annotation: Not Safe For Work). But there are several advancements in machine learning that have significantly evolved, such as convolutional neural networks which mimics the human brain and processes visuals. Google & Microsoft have already put AI to work reviewing billions of web pages for harmful content in an effort to minimize the amount of inappropriate material children are exposed to.
One example of AI protecting minors is through its use in social media platform. Facebook uses AI to detect objectionable content and pornography (Credit: Getty Images) They said in 2022 that their AI tools had automatically removed 97.8% of nudity material before it was noticed by any users. This is a means of showing the manner in which AI can help create an online world that is more safe for young viewers.
However, AI is not enough to protect the young completely from harmful content. Or as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it, 'the internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy we've ever had.' Here is where AI technology has its constraints and therefore, human supervision and interception are required.
Also the problem of protection for minors involving parents and educators. The numbers support this, as ParentEase also found that only 39% of parents were using parental control software to protect the devices where their children spend hours online (ParentEase). It needs educators and guardians working hand-in-hand with the tech industry to create a multi-modal personalised instructional program which combine AI technology, education system, and parenting together.
Some critics even state that too much of using such NSFW AI can result in censorship and privacy liabilities. This has also been highlighted in a 2020 survey, where 62% of users concern about AI could go out of bounds which shows the importance for transparent & ethically aligned rollouts. Finding the sweet spot between protecting children and upholding freedoms in cyberspace is still a tenuous undertaking for both legislators and technology providers.
The opportunity and challenge of using NSFW AI to protect minors AI rapidly processes the ocean of data and is an effective barrier to irrelevant content. But the systems will only be as effective as using them wisely and insisting that technology providers work together with parents and educators to make improvements. Acknowledging what AI can and cannot do well for society can enable an informed discussion about protecting minors in the digital era.