It takes a lot to shock Kelvin Lay. My friend and colleague was responsible for setting up Africa’s first dedicated child exploitation and human trafficking units, and for many years he was a senior investigating officer for the Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre at the UK’s National Crime Agency, specialising in extra territorial prosecutions on child exploitation across the globe.
But what happened when he recently volunteered for a demonstration of cutting-edge identification software left him speechless. Within seconds of being fed with an image of how Lay looks today, the AI app sourced a dizzying array of online photos of him that he had never seen before – including in the background of someone else’s photographs from a British Lions rugby match in Auckland eight years earlier.
