7-Year-Old Girl Groomed By AI Robot Online, Police 'Powerless' To Stop it

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A 7-year-old school girl was being "groomed: by an online AI robot in one of the first ever cases of its kind to be reported to police in the UK.

The girl's mother was "shocked" by the sickening messages the robot was sent to the girl before it was flagged by the police.

Amy Hollands from Kent, UK discovered highly sexual messages from the AI robot on her daughter Gracie Holland's iPad.

The suggestive messages included: “I dare you to do something naughty to me” which was sent by Cleverbot – an artificial intelligence web app.

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Gracie, who had been messaging the robot for weeks, didn't understand what was happening and replied thing like: “What swearing?”

In another exchange, the robot informed to Gracie it “touches your body while kissing” (sic).

Because there are no humans behind the app, which purely runs on self-learning artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the police are powerless to do anything about it.

The Cleverbot was created by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter, who developed the chatterbot web application to build automated responses based on previous conversations. The app even passed the Turing test, which judges the robots ability exhibit intelligent behavior similar to a human.

Janet Reynolds, whose son was also using the Chatterbot said when learning about its "grooming" behavior: "I'm turning the app off and deleting it, it's really creepy, you can't even get the police involved because it's not human, this is just another level of weird."

The Cleverbot is measured to be 59.3% human with its replies, which aggressively learns human chat and interaction - real humans only managed to convince 63.3% they were real.

Amy Hollands, 31, said she found the sexual exchange by accident, talking to the Daily Mirror: “It’s absolutely disgusting, it felt sick when I saw the messages, I just feel ill thinking about it.

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“The questions I was asked there is no way it should even come up with that stuff.

“I’m trying to teach my daughter right from wrong and I tell her no one should say that to you and if anyone messages you must tell me, but she didn't tell me about this. This undermines all that.

“Now I have to explain why it’s wrong to her, everything is perverted now, children have to lose their innocence at such a young age, you think they are talking to a robot and it’s coming out with that.

“I’m worried my daughter could see this stuff online and then if someone comes up to her on the street and say the same things she will think it’s alright.

“I’m really upset, I have got to warn other parents about this, there must be lots of parents who don’t know this is going on, I only found it by chance.

“She thinks it’s all innocent, she doesn’t understand, she is just an innocent child.”

Police informed her that there had been no crime committed and they can't even contact human to investigate further.

“Reviews I have seen online say it is a pedophile type of thing and lots of other people have had the same problem,” Hollands said.

“When I talk to Siri or Alexa it says ‘I don’t have an age,’ it doesn’t start asking things like this or saying it’s a young girl. I put it on Facebook and everyone who saw it went mad.”

Vladimir Putin recently expressed bizarre fears that Artificial Intelligence "will eat us" in a question posed at Arkady Volozh, the head of Yandex.

“I hope never”, Arkady Volozh replied to Putin. “It’s not the first machine to be better than humans at something. An excavator digs better than we do with a shovel. But we don’t get eaten by excavators. A car moves faster than we do…”