Sometimes one wonders if people are really that stupid or if they have ulterior motives, such as with Chat Control.
Chat Control is a proposed measure to protect children from sexual abuse. This would be done by deploying AI on everyone’s phones. That AI would then detect whether you’ ae trying to distribute child pornography.
Now, there’s hardly anything worse than child sexual abuse. However, it is “striking” that this topic is repeatedly brought up when citizens’ privacy is being restricted. Because how can anyone be against child safety? And then you have to be aware!
You can be quite against something if it doesn’t work at all and actually guarantees that there will be less capacity available to go after child abusers.
How do you know it won’t work? There are more than a few child abusers, unfortunately, but let’s assume there are 10,000 in the Netherlands. (I hope much less, but we can easily calculate this for the sum.)
So, out of 10,000 out of 20 million Dutch people, in that case, about 0.05% of the Dutch would have to be tracked by the measure.
So, to track 0.05% of the people out of 20 million, you put AI on the phones of 100% of the people. That might be a very good AI if it makes few enough errors to be useful as an investigative tool. Maybe a factor of 100 less than 0.05%, so say the error rate should be about 0.0005%.
Now we all know that AI makes mistakes; hallucination has become the word of the year in the Netherlands because AI does that so much. ChatGPT-3 got it completely wrong about 33% of the time. ChatGPT-5, drumroll, 50% (FIFTY percent) of the time. It is only getting worse. So then we are making a factor of 100 THOUSAND too many errors!
If you implement this and a police officer has to assess every report to see if it’s child pornography, you’ll need a thousand times a many officers to compensate for the poor quality AI. This is no a solution for a problem that happens infrequently!
The AI that makes so few errors on such a complex and sensitive topic has yet to be invented.
These are very simple calculations that you would think politicians and civil servants should be able to perform them too. They should know that this idea won’t solve the problem it’s proposed for.
At the time of writing, 23 of the 27 EU countries are in favor of Chat Control. So, these countries have held meetings about this!
Either all those politicians are really that stupid, or there is actually another purpose for this technology…
It’s also striking that there’s no computer installed in everyone’s car to automatically give you a ticket for speeding; which easier to check and much more common.
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