Preliminary Considerations on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Cyber Safety for the Protection of Children

Abstract

Pervasive computing has abused information and communication technologies and created new kinds of systemic risks and societal vulnerabilities. With the rise of artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, and pattern recognition systems, all those petabytes of information can be analysed and used to seriously interfere with the rights and liberties of others, and, in particular, it can be used to reveal the most intimate aspects of the lives of others. This, in turn, has offered new and unheard means of criminality, ranging from financial offenses to child exploitation. Therefore, there is a social responsibility for developing systems capable of mitigating the risks that the development of information and communications technologies poses to society. Given that this particular threat involves expression, efforts to mitigate expression-related misconduct must attend to rules that protect expression from government regulation. This article considers one particular area of expression-related misconduct, namely the online abuse of children.