PAEDOPHILES attempting to 鈥済room鈥� children in internet chatrooms can now be detected by a computer program.
The program works by putting on a convincing impression of a young person taking part in a chatroom conversation. At the same time it analyses the behaviour of the person it is chatting with, looking for classic signs of grooming: paedophiles pose as children as they attempt to arrange meetings with the children they befriend.
Called ChatNannies, the software was developed in the UK by Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. It creates thousands of sub-programs, called nanniebots, which log on to different chatrooms and strike up conversations with users and groups of users. If a nanniebot detects suspicious activity it sends an alert to Wightman and emails a transcript of the conversation. If he considers the transcript suspicious, he contacts the relevant police force, giving them the internet address of the suspect user. He claims that tip-offs from his software have already led to police investigations, but 快猫短视频 was unable to verify this before going to press.
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The nanniebots do such a good job of passing themselves off as young people that they have proved indistinguishable from them. In conversations with 2000 chatroom users no one has rumbled the bots, Wightman says. Chatbots scarcely distinguishable from people were predicted by computer pioneer Alan Turing as long ago as 1950, says Aaron Sloman, an artificial intelligence expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
So he is not surprised the bots are so convincing, especially as their conversation is restricted to a limited topic 鈥� like youth culture, say 鈥� and is kept relatively short. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not going to be too difficult for a chatbot to look like an ordinary chatroom participant to other users who are not even on the lookout for them,鈥� he says.
To converse realistically, ChatNannies analyses the sentences other users type, breaks them down into verb and noun phrases, and compares them with those in sentences it has previously encountered. ChatNannies includes a neural network program that continually builds up knowledge about how people use language, and employs this information to generate more realistic and plausible patterns of responses.
One of its tricks is to use the internet itself as a resource for its information on pop culture. Wightman will not reveal how it judges what is reliable information and what not. He does say, however, that each bot has dozens of parameters that are assigned at random, to give each one a different 鈥減ersonality鈥�.
鈥淚f this software works, then it would be marvellous because there is nothing like this out there,鈥� says Chris Atkinson, the internet safety officer with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the UK. But she warns that paedophiles may outsmart it. 鈥淭he grooming activity that I have seen doesn鈥檛 have to be sexual,鈥� she says.
Wightman says, however, that ChatNannies is sophisticated enough to look for less obvious signs that something is amiss. It also looks for slip-ups and inconsistencies that give away an adult posing as a child.
Wightman currently has 100,000 bots chatting away undetected in chatrooms 鈥� the most he can generate on the four internet servers at his IT practice. He would like to build more but funding is the sticking point, as he doesn鈥檛 want anyone to profit financially from his technology. 鈥淪ome companies have offered fantastic sums of money, but all want technology ownership. And that鈥檚 something that isn鈥檛 going to happen,鈥� he says.
Instead, he hopes eventually to get financial support from government-run organisations that focus on child protection.
