How AI Is Making the Internet a Safer Place

There are all kinds of articles in the news at the moment about AI and not all of them are positive. People are understandably a little worried about the impact that AI might have on the world that we know today.

At B M Magazine we recently published an article on how the UK are driving forwards with AI technology, saying that it can help businesses, but that might not be all that AI is useful for. Lately, more and more companies have been using AI to try to create a safer online space for their customers. Whether that’s through helping to prevent fraud, or removing hateful content from social media sites. We’re going to take a look at a couple of the ways that AI is being used in order to keep us safer when browsing the internet.

Helping to Stop Fraudsters

We trust companies with an enormous amount of our information, including at times, our banking details, or even direct access to our funds. This is usually very safe, but with the ever more sophisticated techniques that fraudsters are using, it’s becoming more difficult for humans to police. AI is incredibly adept at dealing with large amounts of data and spotting inconsistencies in patterns. This has proven to be particularly useful when it comes to spotting unusual behavior on user accounts, helping to slow down fraudsters.

One sector that uses this technique with great success is the online casino industry, which has millions of users every day who log on to play their favorite games. Despite what you might think, different players each have different patterns when they’re playing. Some might enjoy making lots of small bets at roulette, whilst others might enjoy placing a handful of larger bets on a slot machine and moving on to a few rounds of poker. AI can analyze the user’s behavior patterns whilst they’re on the site and build up a profile of how they usually behave. This makes it very simple for AI to spot if there are any major inconsistencies and flag this with the provider. Vegas online slots in the UK employs this technology in its security protocols, to ensure that all of its customers’ accounts are kept completely safe. Sometimes the AI might just flag someone trying out something new, but often it will be imperative in stopping a fraudster, which could save the customer a whole lot of money.

Eradicating Triggering Content

As briefly mentioned before, AI is brilliant at scanning large amounts of data very quickly. To put into perspective just how proficient it is at this, an AI program called DeepMind was able to correctly predict the structure of 350,000 proteins in five minutes. It would take a human around a month to predict the structure of just one protein. This is key to effectively eradicating triggering content online because humans can only scan so much. At the moment, there are still careers in moderation that require humans to scan through content that has been flagged as hateful, triggering, or violent. This can understandably take a toll on that human’s mental health but also relies on the person being impartial and scanning through a lot of data quickly.

Content moderating jobs are exactly the kind of roles where AI will outperform humans every time and without risking detrimental mental health. AI can scan thousands of flagged pieces of content at the same time it would take a human to look at just half a dozen. Alongside this, the AI doesn’t have preconceived ideas of what is triggering content, or hate speech, that data is entered and that is what the machine focuses on. If the powers of AI are put to good use within the field of content moderation then this really could make the internet a friendlier and more inclusive place for everyone to be.