Australia\u2019s eSafety commissioner says none of the big technology companies are doing enough to stop images of \u201cthe most heinous abuse to children\u201d from being shared online.<\/p>\n
The criticism comes as the commission registers six new industry codes designed to better protect children from \u201clawful but awful\u201d age-inappropriate content, including the \u201cclear and present\u201d danger posed by AI driven companion chatbots.<\/p>\n
Julie Inman Grant told ABC\u2019s 730 that about 100,000 Australians a month have accessed an app that allows users to upload images of other people, including school students, to receive an accurate depiction of what they would look like naked.<\/p>\n
Inman Grant said she had not heard a major technology company express regret or shame for their role in enabling the sharing of child exploitation images.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what makes it all the more disturbing, having worked in the technology sector for 22 years,\u201d Inman Grant said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know what they are capable of and not a single one of them is doing everything they can to stop the most heinous of abuse to children being tortured and raped and this imagery being perpetuated online.\u201d<\/p>\n
The commissioner said her agency first became concerned about the use of AI companion chatbots late last year, when it was told that children as young as 10 and 11 were spending several hours a day with bots that \u201cwere instructing them and engaging in specific sexual acts\u201d.<\/p>\n
The chatbots are engineered to simulate human-like interactions by adaptive learning and personalised responses.<\/p>\n
Inman Grant said she told industry in April that the draft codes it developed did not do enough to protect children from the harm posed by chatbots.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted under-18s to be prevented from using the chatbots, particularly instructing them on suicidal ideation, self-harm, disordered eating and sexualised acts,\u201d Inman Grant told the ABC.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be the first comprehensive law in the world that will require the companies, before they deploy them, to embed the safeguards and use the age assurance.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new codes will be implemented at the same time as the federal government introduces a ban on under-16s using social media in March next year. They will apply to app stores, interactive games, chatbots, pornography websites, generative AI tools and software manufacturers and suppliers.<\/p>\n
Any service that hosts or facilitates access to content such as pornography, self-harm material, simulated gaming, or very violent material unsuitable for children will need to ensure children are not able to access that content.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know there has been a recent proliferation of these apps online and that many of them are free, accessible to children, and advertised on mainstream services, so it\u2019s important these codes include measures to protect children from them,\u201d Inman Grant said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not want Australian children and young people serving as casualties of powerful technologies thrust on to the market without guardrails and without regard for their safety and wellbeing.\u201d<\/p>\n
These new measures add to earlier codes that require search engines to have age assurance measures for all accounts, and where an account holder is determined to be aged under 18, the search engine would be required to switch on safe search features to filter out content such as pornography from search results.<\/p>\n
One of the industry bodies that worked with the eSafety commissioner to develop the codes, Digi, said they would \u201cintroduce targeted and proportionate safeguards concerning access to pornography and material rated as unsuitable for minors under 18, such as very violent materials or those advocating or [giving instructions for] suicide, eating disorders or self-harm\u201d.<\/p>\n
Companies that do not comply with the codes face a fine similar to that of the social media ban \u2013 up to $49.5m for a breach. Other measures such as eSafety requesting sites be delisted from search results are also an option for non-compliance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s eSafety commissioner says none of the big technology companies are doing enough to stop images of \u201cthe…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":211098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-211097","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115170725372431562","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}