Chinese Anti-Porn Helmet Raises Eyebrows, Questions

Did you know that pornography is completely illegal in China? Probably not surprising news, though, right? The country has already put measures in place to scour the Internet in search of explicit content, mostly using AI. But the government also employs human porn appraisers, called jian huang shi, whose job it is to judge images and videos to decide whether they contain explicit content. Also probably not surprising is that humans are better than AI at knowing porn when they see it — or at least, they are faster at identifying it. Weirdness and morality and everything else aside, these jian huang shi are regular people, and frankly, they get exhausted looking at this stuff all day.

So what is the answer to burnout in this particular field? Researchers at Beijing Jiaotong University have come up with a way to bring the technological and human aspects of their existing efforts together. They’ve created a helmet that can detect particular spikes in brainwaves that occur from exposure to explicit imagery. Basically, it flashes a combination of naughty and ho-hum images in rapid succession until a spike is detected, then it flags the offending image.

One Helmet to Protect Them All

Calling this thing a ‘helmet’ is a bit of a stretch, though we suppose that metaphorically speaking, it is meant to ultimately protect Chinese citizens from sensitive content. All of the news outlets seem to be using stock photos of rubber swimming caps covered with electrodes, which is probably about what it looks like. Unfortunately, we can’t find much detail about the device, and none of the outlets seem to have much, either.

We figure that the cap itself is some kind of bog-standard brainwave-capturing contraption, and the business part is in whatever software they wrote to detect brainwaves in real time and associate the telltale spike with that which must be censored. Oh, but during the study, all the images had the super naughty bits covered up with black bars, because porn is illegal in China.

So, how well does it work? The researchers say that the helmet helps flag almost every explicit image in a given set, but that it also gives false positives. All in all, the device’s accuracy is only around 80%, which the researchers put down to a lack of sufficient training material. Ahem.

Working Girls

Although 100% of the volunteers for the study happened to be university-aged young men, today’s active roster of employed jian huang shi are mostly women, and we have to wonder why that is. Was it by design? Does the government prefer women for this task?

We suppose that women are, overall, less distracted by a flash of nipple here, or a nude buttock there. And if you want to get wild and crazy with the theories, we also suppose that women are less likely to let a bit of beefcake through in the interest of their sexually oppressed sisters all over the nation.

Will Blue-Collar Workers Be the First Batteries?

If you think the anti-porn helmet is a sign of The Matrix to come, consider this: Chinese firms in the construction, manufacturing, and transportation fields are already using AI to monitor the attentiveness and emotions of their workers via sensors in their helmets, all in the name of productivity and increasing the number of days since the last accident. Chilling, indeed, especially since there are no laws in place to govern either the use of the equipment, or the information that it gleans. Of course, it would be unfair to paint this as a uniquely Chinese problem, as employee monitoring is a growth industry in the US as well.

But still, there’s something different in kind about a brainwave-reading cap. Maybe we’re catastrophizing here, but how far off can the day be when every citizen has to wake up each day and don their cap? If they’d let you take it off at night.