BEIJING — A Chinese research team claims to have created a “mind-reading device” that detects “porn watching,” which could be used by the police to enforce the country’s strict obscenity censorship laws against all sexual expression.
An “electrical engineering team combined the power of humans and AI to create a prototype device that sounds an alarm when an indecent image appears,” the South China Morning Post reported this week.
The Beijing Jiaotong University team released images that purport to show a data set of sample images used to train what they termed a “porn police helmet that can read people’s minds to detect pornography.”
The helmet-like device, the South China Morning Post reported, “could speed up the work of censors trying to spot indecent images on the Chinese internet” and when worn by a subject “can pick up a spike in the brainwaves triggered by explicit content.”
Fifteen male university students aged 20-25 volunteered to wear the item in front of journalists.
“Each time a sensitive photo appeared, an alarm went off,” they reported.
Xu Jianjun, director of the electrical engineering experiment centre at Beijing Jiaotong University, wrote that the device is suitable for “bad information detection” in announcing his team’s surveillance invention in a peer-reviewed paper published by China’s Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation earlier this month.
China employs a small army of professional state censors — known as “jian huang shi,” or “porn appraiser” — to monitor videos and photos posted on the internet or social media platforms.
According to Xu, his “police helmet” is “an attempt to use the combined power of human and machine to achieve greater precision and efficiency.”
The Cyberspace Administration of China defines objectionable material, including what it considers “porn” and even “soft porn,” as “serious content prohibited by national law,” and its mission as “monitoring all public information.”