Google is sharing a new AI to make the Internet a nicer place
Internet rule #1: “Don’t read the comments.” It’s not just unfortunate that many of us will unwittingly scroll into abusive speech during our digital journeys. Most tech companies struggle with this exact problem, should they even grapple with it. How do you improve users’ experiences without blacklisting words and losing nuance? Or, hiring a team of humans to go through the worst of the internet’s offerings? (Which, to be fair, does already happen.)
Ever the innovator, Google is offering up a new AI that can automatically detect hate speech and assess the toxicity of statements.
Called Perspective, this AI is the result of Google’s Jigsaw team. Jigsaw came together last September specifically to target the tricky contextual problems around abusive speech and threats on line. Perspective isn’t an AI in the robot sense, but rather a code that can be written into a site. Confused? Test it in action here.
Of course, having an AI take on human nuance doesn’t necessarily mean they’re always going to get it right. We can anticipate future internet arguments hinging on issues of context and intent. But right now, as our internet discourse is quite toxic across the board, we’ll take any tools we can get toward making it a less hateful place.
