Seoul city uses AI technology to monitor digital sex crimes around clock

Business

The Seoul city government has tapped into artificial intelligence (AI) technology to automatically detect and monitor digital sex crimes around the clock, officials said Wednesday.

The city’s center for fighting digital sex crimes introduced an AI-based monitoring system, developed by the Seoul Institute of Technology, to automatically find and delete sexual exploitation videos on social media and prevent their redistribution.

It is the first time in South Korea that AI technology has been harnessed to fight digital sex crimes.

The digital sex crime center went into operation a year ago at the initiative of Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon to provide support for victims, including legal advice and psychotherapy.

The program’s deep learning technology can promptly track down all sexually exploitative videos of a victim from social media by comprehensively analyzing acoustic, visual and textual information, replacing manual monitoring by people, the officials said.

The system dramatically shortens the time needed for such a task from up to two hours to only three minutes, and its accuracy and speed will increase even more as the system accumulates data down the road, city officials said.

It will also help reduce victims’ trauma and stress by having a computer system, not people, handle explicit videos involving them.

Through its one-year operation so far, the center has provided help to 402 victims of digital sex crimes, the officials said, adding that among them, 57 percent were in their teens and 20s.

About 54 percent of the 3,003 videos the center has deleted during the period involved children and adolescents, they said.

Source: Yonhap News Agency