Spanish Chatbot Hunts For Pedophiles

cylonlover writes "For a number of years now, police forces around the world have enlisted officers to pose as kids in online chat rooms, in an attempt to draw out pedophiles and track them down. Researchers at Spain's University of Deusto are now hoping to free those cops up for other duties, and to catch more offenders, via a chatbot that they've created. Its name is Negobot, and it plays the part of a 14 year-old girl." (Read the original source, in Spanish).

14 year old?

[Zedrick]

How will the bot catch pedophiles if it pretends to be a 14 year old girls? Pedophiles won't be very interested, instead it might, in best/worst case, attract hebephiles. Or just normal teenage boys.

Spain?

[IamTheRealMike]

Age of consent in Spain is 13 though they plan to raise it [telegraph.co.uk]. Seems like a 14 year old is an odd choice to emulate for that reason.

That said, an AI capable of simulating a 14 year old girl? Hard to imagine they could even simulate a 5 year old successfully. This doesn't seem like a good use of a universities resources.

Re:Meh

[3.5 stripes]

Pity only a small fraction of pedophiles are out looking on the internet. That and the fact that if the penalties are higher, people will do more to hide their crimes, like instead of threatening their victims, they'll lock them up in a basement, or fit them with some cement shoes for a quick dip in the local river.

Re:wonderful idea!

[Tastecicles]

GOTO statements make me wet.

Re:Only usable in some jurisdictions

[Xest]

This is what I was wondering, doesn't this sort of thing risk giving real criminals an excuse too?

If intent is relevant then with the prevalence of police officers posing in this manner and now bots, couldn't a real criminal just claim "I assumed nowadays that they were all just chatbots or above age of consent officers" if caught chatting to someone who is underage?

It seems to be a dangerous precedent to set. If the police have to prove intent how can they prove he didn't now believe it was a bot or an officer and hence not illegal?

If it's posing as a 14 year old,

[middlehead]

If it's posing as a 14 year old, they're not targeting pedophiles.

Re:wonderful idea!

[mwvdlee]

From TFA:

Should they start exhibiting “suspicious behavior,” such as not caring about the girl’s age or asking her for personal information

"Suspicious behaviour" is defined as either: (A) Asking a girls' age or (B) not asking a girl's age.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re:Hey, great.... finally an AI...

[dgatwood]

This making it even more bizarre that this bot would pretend to be above Spain's legal age of consent. What am I missing?

Everything about this story is wrong:

• The notion that being attracted to a 14-year-old girl (almost invariably post-pubescent) qualifies as pedophilia is completely absurd. There is not a straight adult male alive who, when faced with a sufficiently attractive and mature-looking 14-year-old, would not find her attractive. Thus, some degree of attraction to teenagers is normal male behavior. Mind you, most adults have the good sense not to jump in bed with them, but that doesn't mean the attraction isn't there. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding himself/herself.
• A bot (or a LEO) seeking out people and enticing them in the hopes that one of them will say "Okay, she's hot and worth the risk of jail" is a legally dubious action and is completely contrary to the stated goal of protecting kids. I'd wager that 99.999% of the people entrapped by such a bot would never go near any true kids (defined as pre-pubescent), period, because there is zero correlation between being attracted to teens and being attracted to kids. And most of those folks would not go out of their way to hit on a 14-year-old IRL, either. Given that most 14-year-old girls do not make it a point to trick adult males into having sex with them, this means that those adult males are doing something that they almost certainly (statistically) would not otherwise have done were it not for law enforcement involvement, which meets the strictest definition of entrapment as far as I can tell. But creating such a bot in a country when the act they're trolling for isn't even illegal? Priceless.

I mean, this whole concept borders on the same level of s**t-for-brains stupid as those people who troll boards trying to stir people up to become terrorists and then put them in jail under the premise that if law enforcement could get them into that state, so could real terrorists. But the thing is, unless those real terrorists had a high probability of doing so, you're really just putting people in jail for being gullible, not for actually harboring any terrorist tendencies.

At this point, our world is rapidly verging on jailing people for thoughtcrime—crimethink, if you will. Are we really to the point where the goal is to lock up everyone who isn't of above-average intelligence with near-godlike self control? Is that actually supposed to make our kids safer in some bizarro universe? Could someone please explain to me why the people who came up with this bot should not be jailed themselves as an example to others who would abuse their power?