Negobot: The Virtual Lolita

If you have a habit of making new friends online and your experience has been a good one until now, then you better be careful in the future otherwise you’re in for a big surprise! An example is that your new online “friend” might be an artificially designed intelligent bot, whose job is to trap pedophiles.

An interesting character in the novel by Vladimir Nabokov is “Lolita,” an innocent teenage girl who’s emotionally vulnerable. This is the name (Virtual Lolita) given by some to the new chatbot, originally named Negobot, which poses as Lolita and tricks online sexual predators into giving away their information. This then helps the authorities track down these pedophiles.

Such chatbots use methods like natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning to learn and know how to react to a specific individual, keeping in view his past conversations and comments. These were the tools used at the University of Deusto (Spain) by some researchers to design Negobot, which not only sounds like a teenage girl, but also talks in slang, makes spelling mistakes and has knowledge of the pop culture.

But these aren’t the only things that make Negobot unique. In fact, the real feature that makes it unique is its use of game theory to gain information from, and finally trap, potential pedophiles. So just like in a game you have to follow certain rules, Negobot also follows a set of instructions or “rules” and chats according to them.

It starts at a neutral state and chats with different users in different languages (thanks to the technology to translate), and remains at this state if the users talk normally. If it detects that someone is using insinuation then it changes its state from “neutral” to “possibly [pedophile].” Now it starts sharing some more personal information and if the conversation increases in sexual content, Negobot shares fake personal information about itself and tries to lure the user into meeting her (or it) physically.

Negobot

The online security blog, Naked Security, says that Negobot is a good start to have an idea of the ever increasing child sexual abuse happening on the internet. For this purpose, Negobot has been tested in Google Chat and other online chatting applications.

There are some concerns about its current approach though, and critics say that a program that was supposed to act as bait sometimes takes the role of a hunter. What this means is that since it uses game theory and for it “winning” is to collect the maximum amount of information about its user, it discourages its chat buddy from ending the chat.

If users are impatient with it, the bot will act as the victim and make them feel guilty by saying that it’s lonely and wants affection. If the users ignore it, then Negobot gains their attention by offering them sexual favors.

This could be considered as entrapping the users or even harassing them. According to John Carr, an online child safety specialist, if any information about a potential criminal is gathered using such offers, it cannot be presented as strong evidence in the courts.

The researchers who designed Negobot haven’t announced any changes in its ways of pursuing its chat partners. However, they plan to add new features to it that would enable it to recognize irony and improve its performance further by continuously monitoring the etymological patterns on the internet. This would ensure that Negobot consistently acts as the “virtual Lolita.”