Christians turn to artificial intelligence to battle porn addiction
- Software detects when users are accessing explicit content and sends blurred screenshot to designated ‘accountability partners’
- ‘Purity-industrial complex’ is capitalising on fears of the devout over threat to ‘moral standards’ as porn proliferates on apps and social media, experts say
Evangelical groups are turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to help their members fight addiction to online pornography in a budding industry that one scholar calls an emerging “purity-industrial complex”.
As pornography has exploded beyond just websites to apps and social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr and others, tech companies closely affiliated with church groups are capitalising on the fears of devout Christians that “porn is the greatest threat to Christian purity and even the moral standard of the nation,” said Samuel Perry, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma and author of Addicted to Lust.
A recent report by the Washington-based National Centre on Sexual Exploitation cited a study of university students that found that 93 per cent of boys and 62 per cent of girls were exposed to online pornography during their adolescence.
Another study showed that among college-going men, nearly half were exposed to pornography as early as 13 years of age. A majority, or about 61 per cent, of those accessing salacious material did so using their smartphones, the centre said.
“It used to be that if you wanted to access porn you had to go to a seedy movie theatre or go in a trench coat and buy from a seedy store,” Perry told CQ Roll Call. But the accessibility and anonymity of the internet has dramatically increased access to pornography and brought new fears to the devout, he said.