How Artificial Intelligence Is Tracking Sex Traffickers

Another new A.I. innovation — developed by Robert Beiser, executive director of the anti-trafficking nonprofit Seattle Against Slavery — takes aims at the buyers themselves. The tool works like this: A would-be john texts a girl in an ad, and she responds. They go back and forth about prices, services, fetishes, meeting spot. But as soon as the buyer has made clear he’s willing to pay for sex, he gets a message to the effect of: This could have been a trafficking victim. Law Enforcement now has your information and might follow up with you. Click here for counseling so you can stop doing this.

The girl, it turns out, is a bot.

The program is available to police departments and local governments who customize their own message for johns, choosing among the bot’s various personas — teenage, adult, inexperienced. To operate the program, users place a decoy sex ad, and whenever a potential buyer responds, the bot (who remains nameless and never reveals its identity) starts chatting. All the while the prospective customer’s data — including age and address — flows in to investigators, who can decide whether or not to take action.

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Beiser says that since launching in 2017, the bot has been adopted by more than 10 police departments, and has already disrupted 18,000 transactions. Although subtler than handcuffs and prison time, the technology confronts one of the most stubborn challenges of bringing down sex trafficking: “the very ingrained fantasy in this culture about commercial sex in that everybody is a willing participant,” says Jennifer Long, founder of AEquitas, a nonprofit that works to improve the prosecution of human trafficking. Bradley Myles, head of Polaris, the NGO that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline, agrees. “Even if men aren’t getting arrested, it’s piercing the anonymity of buying sex,” he says. “It’s a shock to the system.”