On his Pluralistic blog, Cory Doctorow reports that the Zoom teleconferencing system purportedly uses artificial intelligence to detect naked people to block the video. He says "I think that Zoom is probably bullshitting about using machine learning to catch nudity." That makes sense, because how can you detect the content of a video stream if, as Zoom promises, the signal is encrypted end-to-end? Cory also looks at the reasons why pornography always seems to be one of the early use cases in any new technology:
The thing is, when a new communications technology comes along, the people who have the most incentive to figure out how to use it are the people for whom the existing technology channels are not working.
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It's also why everyone else whose communications are disfavored, surveilled or blocked adopt technology.
It's what political radicals, kids, religious extremists, terrorists, conspiracists, and criminals all have in common: using the established communications channels is expensive for them, so it's worth expending the effort to master the new ones.
