AI bots available in Ireland raise fears over child grooming
Fears are mounting that highly effective artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots will be used for the “grooming and trafficking” of thousands of children, say experts.
Adam Dodge, the founder of EndTab, a group tackling technology-enabled abuse, warned that AI chatbots that are readily available online are “one small pivot away” from being used to “target kids and groom them at scale”.
“These [chatbots] are very persuasive and very insidious — and those behaviours overlap with grooming and trafficking online,” he said.
“If I created an AI clone of a very successful trafficker and online groomer, and I trained this bot to identify and engage with vulnerable kids online at scale [. . .] now this bot can target 10,000 kids at a time.”
Since the explosion
