Chinese researchers from Beijing Jiaotong University have created a ‘mind-reading’ device that will help China to censor porn from all the websites & pages in the internet, to comply on the country’s policy.
Watching porn is a crime in a number of nations in the world, including China. China has set up an Internet censorship centre for blocking of websites that defies the country’s any of the policies. Electrical engineering team of the University hatched a device that detects when a man is watching pornography by ‘reading his mind’. The device has been made to speed up the work of censors trying to spot indecent images on the Chinese internet.
China had been in practice of employing people to censor the internet from porn for years and ‘jian huang shi’ or ‘porn appraiser’ is what they are called and the role had mostly females. On recent development of AI, and the efficacy it poses, they reckoned the AI-technology. However, porn-image recognition was not to the expected level, as the algorithm couldn’t differentiate images as porn when it had complex backgrounds.
They, therefore opted for a hybrid version of censoring – both people and technology involved, thus created a mind-reading device for maximizing the porn detection.
Porn-detecting Device
University Students between 20 and 25 years, fifteen in number, volunteered to participate in the study. They were asked to wear the device on the head and displayed with a lumpsum of pictures where explicit content (porn/nudity) was one among them. Every time, they happened to see a sensitive photo, an alarm went off as a spike in brainwaves was triggered.
During their research, the team had found that a nude image, even if it was shown for half a second amongst a stream of other images, raised the eyebrows of an observer. The researchers claim that the designed helmet can pick any spike in brainwaves that would result from explicit content.
When a jian huang shi worn the helmet, the device did the task of displaying images to the professional censor and continue to flip through a large number of images until the brain waves observed a spike and flag the content for removal.
The device was so sophisticated to adapt to brain waves of various censors and in fact filter out other brainwaves caused by emotions, weariness or even thoughts.
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Mind-reading Technology for Porn
The device though spiked up to indicate explicit content, it was only 80% efficient and reported some false alarms. Lack of sufficient training material while developing this technology reasons out to be the issue for this, researchers told. Since the gender consideration comes to the talk, as the research involved only men while the actual work involves women, detection process and the spike observed may vary, the team told.
A researcher studying brain-machine interface at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui, said the technology could cause ethical problems, such as privacy infringement.
You might be interested in this: Technology’s influence on Intimacy, relationships & Sex.
“There is no law to regulate the use of such devices or protect the data they collected,” said the researcher who asked not to be named.
China had deployed this mind-reading device not only for censoring porn but into many applications, in which few are listed. The People’s Liberation Army has funded the development of a mind-reading helmet for soldiers to communicate with smart weapons, according to openly available information.
Some factories in China used brain surveillance devices to prevent work accidents by monitoring workers’ attention and emotions. Another recent study by Chinese scientists found that a mind-reading robot could work side-by-side with humans to increase the productivity of an assembly line.
Opinion
Albeit confined under the term ‘people’, we explore and experience differently based on the geography and time that we are about to. Some countries ban certain stuffs while some are liberal. The reason to address this, is to know what is right and what is not. Anything that is in limit & control, doesn’t hurt others’ feelings and emotions and hardly spoils anything around & inside us, could be considered ethical, if you ask me. However, geography’s culture and tradition plays a key role here on deciding.
Do you think, deploying mind-reading device to censor porn is much needed? Share your thoughts in the comments…
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