Leela Ashford: Spark Sustainability Director on the company blocking all AI-generated child sexual abuse images

Spark's becoming the first New Zealand telco to block all child sexual abuse images made with artificial intelligence.

It already stops access to photo-realistic material made by AI, but this move will extend to images which have a cartoon or artistic style.

The website list comes from the Internet Watch Foundation which has seen a 400 percent increase in this type of material.

Spark Sustainability Director Leela Ashford says it blocks the sites automatically.

She says the list can include tens of thousands of websites.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now, Spark has become the first New Zealand telco to
block websites that are hosting AI generated child sex abuse
material stuff that's non photographic. Now what that means is
it doesn't look realistic. It's cartoon style images or artistic
impressions of child abuse material. Leela Ashford is Spark Sustainability
director and with me Hi Leela.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hey, Heather, how are you going? Good?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Thank you? Now the Internet Watch Foundation because they've seen
about a four hundred percent increase of this kind of
stuff AI generated stuff. Are you seeing that?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
So we basically see it through the IWF, So we
take a list that they compile rather than going and
I guess finding it ourselves because it is a legal content.
But yes, they've told us that it's been rising by
about four hundred percent and that includes both you know,
photorealistic as well as non photographic images and videos, which

(00:49):
is really concerning.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, and so are they the ones who tell you
what websites to block?

Speaker 2 (00:54):
That's right, because you know, Spark can't have its people
obviously going and trawling for that kind of material be
illegal for us to access it. So the way that
it works is IWF has its own organization in place.
It has appropriate people who are trained to identify this content.
They create a list that automatically, it's automated to come

(01:15):
into our network, and then we block it, and that
list gets updated around twice a day, so it's very current.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
How many websites you've blocked.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
We don't have a specific tracking of it at this
stage because we've just implemented broad it in. But THEWF
list itself can be anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands,
but because it's updated twice a day, that number does
change over time.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
What about a site like Twitter? Would you go as
far as to block that?

Speaker 2 (01:47):
No, So this is the challenge with network blocking. It's
a bit of a blunt instrument. So the only thing
that Spark can do is block at a total network level,
So that means we block a whole domain or a
whole week site. So when IWF says to us, this
whole website is full of this awful material, then we
block it. But if it was something hosted within a

(02:08):
Facebook page or a post, for example, the only tool
we have available is to block Facebook for everyone on
the Spark network, which obviously we can't do. So you
do need a number of different interventions to tackle this issue.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
But that is though, Leela, I guess, I mean that
shows just the extent of what we can do, which
is that we can't get rid of it all right,
because even if we've blocked every single bad website out there,
there will still be people who use Twitter to share
this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Absolutely, and I think if there are people who want
to access this material, they will, They will get around
our network blocking with certain tools. But what we're trying
to do, I guess, is to protect particularly kids, but
any of our customers from inadvertently stumbling across this because
this content isn't just on the dark Web, it's across

(02:55):
the Internet.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Hey are you worried? Unrelated, but are you worried about
the three G shutdown?

Speaker 2 (03:01):
We're doing a lot of work on the three G
shutdown obviously, this is you know, the old version, the
old G, and we're now into four G and we've
got five G coming.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
We're going to shut down.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, we've been communicating to our customers who are using
devices that are impacted by three G. So you'll start
to notice you're either getting direct messages or when you
start to make a call on your phone, it'll start
to say, hey, you're dialing from a device that is impacted.
There are devices like what you're talking about that are
not necessarily connected to us, like IoT sensors or medical alarms,

(03:40):
and generally those businesses and managing the communications. But we're
working very closely with them to ensure that we're giving
everyone a really long heads up before it shuts down.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Yest year. Yeah, hey, thank you very much, Lena, look
after yourself. Leilah Ashband, sustainability director, It'spike. For more from
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