China develops porn-detection helmet that reads mind waves for censorship reasons

WTF?! China, often at the forefront of Orwellian surveillance technology, has made a product that detects when someone is seeing pornography, a pastime that has been illegal in the region considering that 1949.

As reported by the SCMP (by means of Hackaday), China utilizes a mixture of AI bots and human appraisers, referred to as Jian Huang shi, most of whom are girls, to lookup the world-wide-web for photos and determine if they comprise explicit written content deemed illegal. But tiredness and overexposure signify even these safeguards will not halt every little bit of x-rated materials from slipping through the cracks.

This is your brain on porn

Scientists at Beijing Jiaotong College created a way to possibly make lifestyle a lot easier for the appraisers. The anti-porn helmet, or wire-coated shower cap, to be more exact, can detect spikes in human brainwaves that happen when we see specific photos. It can even dismiss mind waves caused by other activities, such as thoughts, weariness, or even random views.

Researchers have examined the product on 15 male volunteers aged 20-25, in which it worked each individual time they noticed something that could be classed as porn. On the other hand, there ended up some wrong positives, which ended up blamed on a absence of sufficient training material—what with pornography remaining unlawful in China and all. You can find also a dilemma around irrespective of whether it will perform just as very well on the primarily female Jian Huang shi.

The concept guiding the helmet is that appraisers could be shown a big variety of pictures in quick succession, and the system will quickly log any that are much too naughty for the point out, rather than the appraisers gradually clicking by means of each individual 1 and deciding if it's much too hot to deal with.

But there are fears about the device's uses outside the house of this scenario. Some Chinese factories use brain surveillance products by using displays in helmets to increase productiveness and minimize worksite incidents. There are no guidelines proscribing what information they can obtain, so who understands wherever this sort of matter could lead.