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13 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 25 OCTOBER 2026 NEWS AI could be used to spot grooming from players' in-game behaviour ARTIFICIAL intelligence could help detect child grooming in online games by analysing play- er behaviour, a University of Malta professor has said. Georgios Yannakakis, a re- searcher on digital games, said platforms with data on how players engage could, in princi- ple, train systems to flag pred- ators. "You could build AI that protects you against these peo- ple," he said. His comments follow a Malt- aToday report on 5 October, in which a police inspector from the Counter-terrorism Unit de- scribed how violent online net- works make contact with chil- dren inside games. However, Yannakakis warned that AI is also a risk. He said AI can act with full agency. "AI can be a virus in a game," he said, adding the danger comes not only from toxic or predatory people but also from AI. Gener- ative AI can create "convincing people or avatars" that "move around, play your game and talk to children", he said. Such agents could be exploited by people who want to be in con- tact with children. But AI could also serve as a counter-agent to protect chil- dren. "We need the vaccine that comes in the form of AI," Yannakakis said. Studios that want generative AI to make games "more creative, more fun to play" should "equally invest money and afford resources to make AI that is protecting its users from malicious AI", he said. He suggested an "AI compan- ion" that would warn a player before they start chatting with a human or an AI agent. It would sit "in addition to your parents, who might not be there when you need them", Yannakakis said. His argument draws on a 2021 study, For Honour, co-authored with Ubisoft researchers. Ran- dom forest models trained on gameplay from 1,793 players sanctioned by Ubisoft commu- nity managers distinguished sanctioned players from others with at least 82% accuracy. He said the team could "eas- ily" identify toxic players just by looking at particular playing patterns. Players who preferred fighting AI opponents tended to be more toxic when matched against humans. Chat is where the risk sits Police Inspector Zachary Zammit had told MaltaToday that chat is one of the biggest factors in how children are ap- proached in games. Yannakakis said playing is "a safe space", but chatting "can be safe only if it is somehow regulated". One of the 2021 study's pre- dictors of toxic behaviour was chatting patterns within the game. Chat is "a very power- ful medium" for allowing so- cial interaction among players, Yannakakis said. However, he warned, it can also enable grooming and toxic behaviours. Studios like Roblox or Ubi- soft could monitor behaviour centrally and send alarms when predictions suggest grooming may be happening, he said. Protection models would need data on reported cases to learn from, but such cases are rare. Still, algorithms can learn from a few examples and make high- ly accurate predictions, he not- ed. "As long as we have data of reported grooming behaviours, then we can build AI models that learn to predict these pat- terns." What Roblox says it does Roblox now requires a face scan age check to chat, assign- ing users to age groups that can communicate with their own and neighbouring groups. Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said it estimates ages for us- ers under 18 "within about 1.4 years, plus or minus". Parents told the BBC children had been wrongly identified as adults. Yannakakis said the key ques- tion is "how bulletproof it is". If data showed six-year-olds interacting with 30-year-olds, "then clearly the system is not safe", he said. "Roblox needs to redesign this regulatory frame- work, and they need to improve on their safety." Roblox also uses Sentinel, an AI tool to detect early signs of child endangerment. The com- pany says Sentinel identified nearly 70% of cases detected in the 12 months to 7 August 2026. The industry's AI problem Yannakakis said studios are trying to use AI to create new worlds and games. He expects smarter agents and non-play- er characters and more open worlds and open narratives in games. "But there is a catch at the same time," he said. Some major studios' aggressive AI adoption has "backfired" and developers are not entirely happy with this aggressive AI adoption in some studios. Yannakakis, who is also CEO and co-founder of Human Feedback AI, said its tools measure player experience using video, sound and voice. The project was funded by Xjenza Malta, a government agency, through the Label.me TDP Lite project. Yannakakis sees no reason the tools could not detect tox- icity with access to chat be- haviour. Videos, he said, are very powerful high-resolution signals that reveal a lot of in- formation. "Human review- ers identify toxic behaviour in gameplay footage so then we can learn to predict it," he said. JULIANA ZAMMIT jzammit@mediatoday.com.mt Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis Professor, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta

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