Chinese 'mind-reading' device built to detect and censor porn

Viewing pornography in China is a crime, and authorities have used artificial intelligence (AI) and "porn appraisers" to flag questionable content.

Researchers from China's Beijing Jiaotong University have created a device that can detect pornography when a man is watching it by "reading his mind." In an experiment involving fifteen male university students aged 20 to 25, a device worn on the head detected spikes in brainwave activity whenever an explicit image appeared on a computer screen in front of the wearer.

The device is a proof-of-concept for human-machine collaboration in detecting explicit imagery, catching what AI misses, and assisting porn appraisers, or jian huang shi, that professionally scour and censor content, and are much more accurate than AI, but cannot continuously carry out the task. A peer-reviewed paper on the prototype device was published on June 13th in the Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation.

"There is no law to regulate the use of such devices or protect the data they collected," said a researcher from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui, who is studying brain-machine interfaces and says the technology would only result in ethical problems, including privacy infringement.