Lisbon, June 8, 2025 (Lusa) - Chief Inspector of the Judicial Police Luís Afonso advises caution when sharing information on artificial intelligence (AI) systems, adding that the police are investing heavily in this area.

"I would advise people to be very careful with the information" they put into AI systems, "especially personal information," said the chief inspector of the National Unit for Combating Cybercrime and Technological Crime (UNC3T) in an interview with Lusa.

According to Luís Afonso, "people put their bank statements there to calculate averages, to analyse" or even their medical records "to see if artificial intelligence has a different opinion from that of the doctor".

"Be careful with this, at least be aware that once it is posted there, it will be there forever," warns Luís Afonso, noting that it is unknown what will be done with this information.

There is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), "but it is for normal data, for what we have been used to until now," he continues.

"Once we put data into an artificial intelligence assistant, we don't know what they do with it, and that's the truth," he says.

And in the case of AI models, where the rules are not the same as in Europe or the United States? "If we are putting it in a country that may in the future be potentially hostile to us, I think it is even more risky, whereas here in Europe, especially with US assistants, we have some confidence." However, "of course the data will be used," he says.

"Now when we're giving it to assistants based in China, we have no idea" how that data will be used, "but it will be used, for sure."

Not least because "it's a huge source of information. In fact, the assistants themselves, the AI itself, learns from everything we put in there; they're always learning," he stresses.

However, these AI tools are available to both sides.

Therefore, Luís Afonso believes that we will see a "race for originality among criminals to find new modus operandi" and the PJ "trying to follow and discover them".

With AI, "one of the things we can try to do is predict the behaviour of criminals in the same way that criminals may try to predict our reaction," he stresses.

"We are going to have a race here in the future. This seems like it is many years away and almost science fiction, but no, the development of artificial intelligence is happening at an enormous speed," adds the chief inspector of UNC3T.

The speed is "brutal" and "will be in our lives very quickly and in the lives of the criminal world for sure".

As for the capacity of the PJ, he said that teams are being formed, without giving numbers, which is the responsibility of the National Directorate.

"I can say that there is a very large investment," he stressed, saying he is pleasantly surprised and pointing out that the hierarchy is always open to listening to those on the ground and their suggestions, as is the ministry itself.

"We are preparing, but it has already been decided, a very large investment, some steps have already been taken and a very strong investment in this area.

We will have to train more people, of course, as with the whole of society, there will have to be greater personal and material investment," stresses Luís Afonso.

"We expect everything to go well [...], I think that this time the criminals will not leave us behind," he stresses, saying he has "the firm conviction" that this "will be one of the cutting-edge areas within the police force".

As for “deepfakes,” the chief inspector pointed out that nowadays it is possible to create films with AI of “extraordinary quality” and there are “tools to detect whether that image is real or not.”

In this sense, there will be "a race between adversarial systems, where one tries to make a more perfect image, a more perfect film, and the other tries to detect what is wrong there".

According to the official, AI "poses major challenges in the investigation of child pornography because there are methods that, if used, could make it much more difficult to track child pornography".

Over time, "authorities worldwide have developed methods" that result in more than 90% [of cases] and AI, "with simple, freely available tools, can give us much more work and undo" some of this methodology that has been developed for some time and has given "good results", he concludes.

ALU/ADB // ADB.

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