A compliment beneath a teenager’s video may look harmless. So can a question about the poster’s age. But when such comments lead to trust-building and requests for private conversations, they might become the opening moves of online grooming. Detecting that pattern is the next challenge for the National Center for Digital Sexual Crime Response, where artificial intelligence (AI) has already improved its capacity to detect suspected child sexual exploitation material and streamlined the process of requesting its removal. “A teenager posts a short video and receives comments such as ‘You’re pretty’ or ‘How old are you?’ These may seem like harmless compliments or signs of interest. But when they are used to build trust and steer the child toward private contact, they can mark the beginning of online grooming,” an official from the center said during a demonstration for reporters, Tuesday. “Because the individual words are not inherently suspicious, keyword searches alone cannot detect the pattern. That is why we’re now developing technology that looks beyond isolated