Dr. Rebecca Portnoff

Vice President
Data Science
Thorn

Presentation Title:

Safety by Design for Generative AI:
Preventing Child Sexual Abuse

Presentation Summary:

Atom icon for The AI Conference 2023, a groundbreaking two-day event on AGI, LLMs, Infrastructure, Alignment, AI Startups, and Neural Architectures.We are at a crossroads with generative artificial intelligence (generative AI). Generative AI is being misused today to further sexual harm against children. 1 in 10 minors report knowing peers that have used generative AI to create explicit images of other kids; 11% of reports of sexual extortion (in which tactics were apparent) to the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, included threatening children with fake sexual imagery; 50% of Law Enforcement have encountered AI-generated child sexual abuse material used to groom minors; the Internet Watch Foundation observed a 10% increase in sadistic and hardcore AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the material they assessed from 2023 to 2024.

Yet, we find ourselves in a rare moment — a window of opportunity — to still go down the right path with generative AI and ensure children are protected as the technology is built. In a show of powerful collective action, some of the world’s most influential AI leaders have chosen to do just that. In collaboration with Thorn and All Tech Is Human: Amazon, Anthropic, Civitai, Google, Invoke, Meta, Metaphysic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and Stability AI have publicly committed to Safety by Design principles. This responsible and ethical AI framework guards against the creation and spread of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (AIG-CSAM) and other sexual harms against children.

Brain icon for The AI Conference 2023, a groundbreaking two-day event on AGI, LLMs, Infrastructure, Alignment, AI Startups, and Neural Architectures.​This presentation will cover the details of this initiative: how strategy has resulted in impact, how this framework for responsible and ethical AI as it relates to child safety has been adopted globally, and how AI governance and responsible AI professionals can pursue this same impact.

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Picture of About | Dr. Rebecca Portnoff

About | Dr. Rebecca Portnoff

Dr. Rebecca Portnoff has dedicated her career to defending children from sexual abuse. She holds a B.S.E. from Princeton and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, both in Computer Science, and has been working at the intersection of ML/AI and child safety for over a decade.

She is currently Vice President of Data Science at Thorn, where the ML/AI and algorithmic solutions her team builds have global impact: used across hundreds of law enforcement agencies, hotlines, and technology companies. She acts as an ecosystem leader to address emerging threats against children via novel research, standard setting, and cross-sector collaborations, bridging the gap between child safety experts and technologists.

Rebecca is an MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35 innovator and Fast Company AI 20. She serves on the UNICRI AI for Safer Children Advisory Board and the National Advisory Committee on the Trafficking of Children and Youth in the United States. Her work has been recognized and featured by outlets such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, Forbes, and more.