Dr. Rebecca Portnoff generates awareness of the threat landscape, enablers, challenges and solutions to the complex but addressable issue of online child sexual abuse.  

Rebecca and Kimberly discuss trends in online child sexual abuse; pillars of impact and harm; how GenAI expands the threat landscape; personalized targeting and bespoke abuse; Thorn’s Safety by Design Initiative; scalable prevention strategies; technical and legal barriers; standards, consensus and commitment; building better from the beginning; accountability as an innovative goal; and not confusing complex with unsolvable.  

Dr. Rebecca Portnoff is the Vice President of Data Science at Thorn, a non-profit dedicated to protecting children from sexual abuse. Read Thorn’s seminal Safety by Design paper, bookmark the Research Center to stay updated and support Thorn’s critical work by donating here. 

Related Resources 

• Thorn’s Safety by Design Initiative (News): https://www.thorn.org/blog/generative-ai-principles/  
• Safety by Design Progress Reports: https://www.thorn.org/blog/thorns-safety-by-design-for-generative-ai-progress-reports/  
• Thorn + SIO AIG-CSAM Research (Report): https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/ml-csam-report  

A transcript of this episode is here.