The development and growth of artificial intelligence is an undeniable fact. After the introduction of artificial intelligence and the initial hype, now this technology is moving towards practical and useful uses.
One of the problems and challenges that children and teenagers face today in cyberspace is sexual abuse of them in this space. This has caused this space to become an unsafe and dangerous space for these people.
A study being conducted by Virginia Tech researchers will examine the use of artificial intelligence to protect children from online sex offenders. In this study, they will use artificial intelligence as a tool to teach children and teenagers to prevent this incident.
If this question has arisen for you, how does artificial intelligence help prevent sexual abuse of children on the Internet? We suggest you stay with us until the end of this article.
Description of the topic at a glance
Sexual abuse of children and teenagers in cyberspace is one of the challenges that many children, teenagers and their families face.
The report of the World Health Organization shows that one out of every three Internet users worldwide is a child. This issue makes the care and protection of children in cyber space more important.
Considering the importance of the issue, to solve this problem, Virginia Tech researchers are conducting a study on the use of artificial intelligence to build chatbots that teach children how to identify Internet criminals.
Growing risks
“Jin-Hee Cho”, the senior researcher of this project, says: “Cyber security helps protect networks from disruption and data theft; But what is more attention today is social cyber security, which is related to the safe social interaction of people in cyber space.
The social interactions that have developed through the Internet space are very useful for educational, economic and innovation growth. But considering the dangers that always exist in cyberspace and threaten it; This branch of cyber security was created to take care of the interactive benefits of this space.
The increase in the presence of children and teenagers in this space has made crimes and sexual abuse of them become one of the dangers that always threaten this space due to ignorance and lack of identification of criminals.
In 2021, a survey was conducted of 2,639 children and adolescents who had been sexually abused. The results of this study show that this abuse took place in different ways, including pictures, text messages without consent, sexual extortion, etc.
These risks have caused various groups to work to prevent such incidents from happening and make cyberspace and the Internet a safe space for constructive and useful interactions. The importance of this issue is so high that in 2005, the United States designated the month of June as the National Internet Safety Month with the aim of increasing awareness of the dangers of the Internet.
Education with the help of artificial intelligence
Jin Ho Cho says, “Despite the fact that many works have been done in the field of internet child abuse prevention and efforts have been made to teach children how to identify these criminals, children and teenagers are still vulnerable to these risks.”
Considering this issue, Chu and his colleagues are studying and working on a project that aims to increase the awareness of children and teenagers in this field and to identify Internet criminals. In this project, they use artificial intelligence technology to build and develop chatbots in which interactions between children and criminals are simulated.
They believe that this simulation can be used to create an educational program for children and teenagers between the ages of 11 and 15, which can protect them from the dangers of cyberspace.
He and his colleagues hope to be able to protect children and teenagers from these dangers by building educational robots that most closely resemble human interactions.
The lack of sufficient data on how criminals and children interact is their most important challenge in this field, and all their team members have emphasized this issue. They hope to collect this data through human-centered approaches with the help of teenagers and parents and use it responsibly in building the chatbots in question.
final word
Practical and useful use of artificial intelligence and tools based on it can be an important step in its further development. Using artificial intelligence to educate teenagers and children to prevent online sexual crimes is a very important step in the field of caring for children in the internet space.
Virginia Tech researchers hope that by simulating relationships between criminals and children in artificial intelligence chatbots, they can create an efficient educational tool to make it easy for children and teenagers to recognize criminals, in order to protect them in this space.
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