Government to Tackle Digital Sex Crimes Against Children and Adolescents with AI Technology

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced that it held a kickoff meeting for the 'AI-based Child and Adolescent Online Sexual Exploitation Proactive Response System Introduction' project, which is being promoted through the 'Digital-Based Social Issue Resolution Project' in collaboration with the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, at the Sejong Government Complex on the 23rd. 
The 'Digital-Based Social Issue Resolution Project' aims to improve public services closely related to people's lives and solve social issues by proactively applying digital new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud computing. The 'AI-based Child and Adolescent Online Sexual Exploitation Proactive Response System Introduction' project by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family was selected as a major project through a designated competition under the theme of 'Solving Social Problems of Sexual Crimes' following the emergence of digital sex crimes such as deepfake sex crimes as serious social issues. 
This project aims to automatically detect and block child and adolescent sexual exploitation materials online to prevent victimization and create a safe online environment. Previously, the identification of child and adolescent sexual exploitation materials relied mainly on manual monitoring methods, such as keyword-based manual searches by officials from the Korea Women's Human Rights Institute, and even when such materials were found, requests for deletion were made manually to platform companies.
Through this project, a self-learning AI system will be established and integrated, enabling real-time monitoring 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. By utilizing AI algorithms, it will detect suspicious information through harmfulness analysis of sexual exploitation keywords and images on online platforms, and by advancing analysis technology, it will organize a review queue according to risk level to systematically review and support deletion. It will request deletion of detected posts to related platforms using report and deletion support APIs and systematically manage processing records. Additionally, the Korea Women's Human Rights Institute, as a co-organizing institution, plans to play an important role in designing a consultation linkage and victim response system within the platform based on its expertise in victim protection.
The kickoff meeting was attended by the Ministry of Science and ICT, the National Information Society Agency, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and other project organizing institutions and implementing companies to discuss strengthening digital response capabilities to crimes against socially disadvantaged groups, such as digital sexual exploitation issues, and the direction of inter-agency collaboration for building an AI and data-based proactive response system. Through this project, an integrated system from victim report to deletion support and consultation linkage will be established to build a more systematic and sustainable digital sex crime response model.
The Ministry of Science and ICT stated, "We plan to actively support the integration of digital technologies such as AI into public services to protect socially disadvantaged groups and contribute to building a digital safety net that citizens can feel."

solidkjy@fnnews.com Koo Ja-yoon Reporter