Child catfishing victim and adult perpetrator identified by gardaí using AI

Generative AI will be of most benefit to the gardaí in processing reams of data.

Gardaí used AI to identify a young girl catfished by a 41 year-old man in order to get her to send him sexualised images.

Detective Sergeant Paul Johnstone, of the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau (GNCCB) told the DPP’s annual prosecutors' conference at the Convention Centre in Dublin that gardaí were able to use an image of the victim's school crest from her uniform to run a search on Interpol's child sexual exploitation database (ICSE) and got a match to identify the school, the victim, and the suspect.

The child has now had an appropriate intervention, and there is the potential for the prosecution of the suspect.

He was giving an example of how generative AI can help solve real-world crimes.

Det Sgt Johnstone told the conference that AI is both a problem and an asset for police, but added that there are "significant benefits" for law enforcement.

He said, however, that there will “always have to be a final review that takes place by an actual, physical person", in terms of how AI is used for crime prevention.

"There is a human interaction at the very end to make sure that what happens is legitimate and can be stood over under scrutiny," he said.

An Garda Siochána would use generative AI for processing reams of data, he said.

A computer 20 years ago, when Det Sgt Johnstone joined the force, contained the equivalent data of the National Library, but he said that now all computers, and notably smartphones, contained the equivalent of the contents of the national libraries of every European country, making the processing of digital evidence an especially onerous task for law enforcement.

"We can identify victims and suspects using that system (AI), using that process much quicker than we ever could before, certainly much quicker than trawling through 200,000 images of child-sexual abuse material to see if there's an identifiable victim or an object that we might potentially be able to locate, or drill down to what it is, where it is," he said.

He added that AI is also used by the force to minimise the exposure of Garda staff to "offensive material".

"We can automate that process, limit the welfare impact on them, and enable them to move on to something completely different," he said.

It is very difficult for law enforcement to tell the difference between deep-fake videos and the real thing, and AI has fixed a lot of the problems of poor language used in phishing scam emails.

"It]s much more difficult to know that it's actually a potential phishing email," he said.

Det Sgt Johnstone acknowledged that it is uncertain where AI technology will eventually go, however, noting that "it’s not possible" to know everything about cyber.

"If anyone says they have all the answers about cyber, then they’re lying to you," he said.