Dating app Bumble has open-sourced its racy spot-detection AI program, first released in 2019. This tool helps protect users from certain unsolicited photos - not just genitalia but also shirtless selfies and firearm photos.

User-received suspect images are blurred to allow them to be viewed, blocked, or reported. Despite being impossible to combat entirely, AI can help combat online harassment by focusing on the individual user.

Surprisingly, shocking research has found that as of 2020, 75.8% of girls aged between 12 and 18 had been sent unsolicited nude images.

Thanks to the development of its AI-protection tool, Bumble has made it possible to help more people in the digital world.

"We hope that the wider tech community will adopt the feature as we work together to make the internet safer," Bumble said.

AI moderation is problematic. Human moderators, for instance, can tell the difference between content that exposes war crimes and terrorist propaganda that glorifies hate and violence.

With the help of AI tools such as the one open-sourced by Bumble, moderators can be protected by blurring the content while still utilizing their unique skills.

In a recent blog post, Bumble tried to explain how it grappled with performance issues and the ability to serve its entire user base.

"We implemented (in its latest iteration) an EfficientNetv2-based binary classifier: a convolutional network that has faster training speed and overall better parameters efficiency.

"It uses a combination of better-designed architecture and scaling, with layers like MBConv (that utilizes 1×1 convolutions to widen up the space and depth-wise convolutions for reducing the number of overall parameters) and FusedMBConv (that merges some steps of the vanilla MBConv above for faster execution), to jointly optimize training speed and parameter efficiency."

"The model has been trained to leverage our GPU-powered data centers in continuously exercising the dataset, network, and hyperparameters (the settings used to speed up or improve the training performance) optimization."

The Bumble tool achieves "world-class performance" of over 98 percent accuracy in both upsample and production-like settings.

You can find this blurring tool on GitHub here. This software is distributed under the Apache license. You can modify and implement it as-is or use it to see obscenities in explicit photographs and adjust it with added training samples.

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