Censorship in China: Helm detects porn

Researchers in China have developed a new and adventurous method of detecting porn for the purpose of censorship. It’s a helmet-like device that can detect spikes in human brainwaves when the viewer is shown pornographic content.

The background to this development is that pornography has been banned in China since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. To censor pornographic content online, the People’s Republic uses AI-Bot to detect and flag inappropriate footage. Despite additional human analysts, authorities still elude some raunchy images and videos. Therefore, the state looked for new ways of porn censorship.

To improve and automate the existing censorship, researchers at Beijing Jiaotong University have developed a kind of “mind-reading” helmet. While this one looks like a shower cap fitted with wires, it is designed to maximize the efficiency of the effort. He should be able to recognize pornographic images with high accuracy. He should even filter out potentially distracting brainwaves.

In one experiment, 15 male volunteers aged 20 to 25 were shown pornographic content. The researchers found that the technology worked with an 80 percent accuracy on explicit images. However, there were also false alarms, which the researchers explained with “inadequate training material”. This new technology should make work easier for porn raters in the future. Instead of clicking through hundreds of images every day and grading them too manually, you could show them a multitude of images in quick succession while the computer would do the rest based on their brainwaves.

Source: South China Morning Postvia InterestingEngineering