
Alphabet’s hate-fighting AI doesn’t understand hate yet - mpweiher
https://qz.com/918640/alphabets-hate-fighting-ai-doesnt-understand-hate-yet/
======
eighthnate
It is not possible for any AI to understand hate because hate is arbitrary and
depends on your position. Hate is a reflection of history, propaganda, etc. It
is an arbitrary human/societal invention.

Hate isn't "science/math/etc". There isn't an algorithm that can objectively
look at speech/data and say it is hate without causing a lot of issues of
friendly fire.

If jew says I hate nazis is that hate? Or is it only hate if a nazi says I
hate jews. Or an atheist says I hate muslim saudis vs muslim saudis say I hate
atheists. Are they both hate? Or does it depends on your culture/position.

A simple unbiased AI would say they are all hate. And that's the problem. We
would require humans to step in to decide what is hate or not. Which
introduces other problems. A youtube saudi "moderator" would say atheists are
hateful and ban atheist content. While a european atheist might say saudi
muslim speech is hateful and ban extreme muslim content.

And that's how free speech dies. By trying to please and accommodate everyone,
we drop ourselves to the lowest common denominator.

~~~
sametmax
Hate does not "depends on your position". Hate is an emotional state, and it's
the same for everybody.

The symptoms of hate "depends on your position". So called "hate speeches"
depends a lot of your position. But they are not hate. Actually, a lot of the
things that are censored because they are categorized as hate are just
inconvenient for some people, but nowhere near hate. As usual, words are used
and distorted to serve agendas.

You can recognize hate across cultures, across symptoms, because as a human
being, you learned to detect the clues that hint some hate behind some
behavior. It's not perfect, but the thing is hate is rarely subtle, and quite
explanatory in its effects.

Hate also always root in unhappiness. And symptoms of happiness are something
you can learn to detect as well.

So yes, while you can't have an objective way to measure hate, you can
approximate the way human evaluate it by measuring the context of happiness
and assess symptoms, on a global + local scale. I may very well give you a
good picture of hate.

~~~
marcosdumay
> Hate also always root in unhappiness. And symptoms of happiness are
> something you can learn to detect as well.

That is correct and everything... But why can't I read it without instantly
imagining a "you seem to be unhappy, citizen; please, come along into jail"
kind of dystopia?

~~~
sametmax
Because it's a real risk if society mistake potential threats with actual
ones. Given the current tendency of trading freedom for security it's a sane
concern.

------
nhaehnle
_Humans_ can't agree on what constitutes hate speech. I mean, there are
general sentiments that most reasonable people agree on, but it gets hairy
_very_ quickly in the details.

The real problem here is that by letting an AI decide what is hate speech and
what isn't, we're adding a pretense of objectivity to a decision mechanism
that is subjective. It adopts the subjective bias of its "teachers", but that
is easily hidden from view. Which means that people who are judged unfairly
will be less likely to get due process.

And of course, this issue generalizes to a much wider range of AI, including
application that already exist (think credit ratings as the most basic
example). That's a much more real danger of AI than killer robots.

------
meri_dian
Solutions to complex filtering and regulatory problems can usually be grouped
into two categories of approaches: a 'top-down' centralization approach, or a
'bottom-up' distribution approach.

Developing a system that will categorize what hate speech is and what it is
not is an example of a top-down approach that centralizes the decision making
process.

Allowing individuals to decide what hate speech is for themselves and acting
accordingly is a bottom-up approach that distributes decision making among all
nodes of the system.

The distributed, decentralized approach - the one that the modern internet
employs today, where users decide for themselves what websites to frequent and
who to interact with - is more appropriate for handling hate speech because it
is much better at taking into account the nuance of specific situations and
distinguishing what is hate from what is not hate. A centralized approach will
either be too aggressive in its filtering or not aggressive enough.

Human civilization is becoming more and more inclusive every year. I do not
believe we need to curtail free speech in order to continue on the path
towards a more inclusive and accepting world.

A much more effective approach to eliminating hate - one that does not require
us to relinquish the right to free speech - is to continue improving the
living standards of all people, especially the poor. I believe that hate is
ultimately a manifestation of fear. When the fear of economic marginalization
diminishes, so too will the frustration and anger that derives from such
marginalization.

------
sniglom
This is just scary, there's no way this will be unbiased.

Sure, some stuff people write is just hate with the only motive to offend
others.

But there is also facts that can be viewed as offensive, while still being
true. Does that mean facts will be hate speech and automatically hidden by an
AI? Ouch.

~~~
MikkoFinell
Only facts that are deemed offensive to the political leaning of Google of
course.

Time to jump ship.

------
justadeveloper2
The whole thing makes me queasy--to think that somebody is going to determine
what to censor on the Internet can never be anything but a bad dream. We can
suffer through the hate speech and counter it with rational arguments. But
once censorship gets going, it is very hard to get back from there.

~~~
adventured
> But once censorship gets going, it is very hard to get back from there.

There is no coming back from there. It's a global authoritarian wet dream.
They've been chasing this goal for two decades now, it's why they invented the
fake concept of hate speech in the first place. Specifically the US is the
only hold-out on what could be called near-absolute free speech. Once that
kind of power of censorship is handed to US authorities, the entire planet
will instantly get darker, due to the vast scope of the US influence on speech
online.

------
CM30
I'm not surprised. It's much easier to 'identify' hate by the tone than it is
the actual content of the remark, and that seems to be what system is doing.
It's making the typical (often human) mistake that somehow the 'toxicness' of
a remark can be determined by how polite it's worded rather than what the
person is actually saying.

But that's obviously not the case. You can be a horrible person without
raising the tone of your voice or swearing and a perfectly nice one while
swearing like a sailor in a loud and somewhat terse way. The validity of a
critique isn't determined by how nicely it's written.

------
5trokerac3
There's absolutely no way this technology will be used for unscrupulous
purposes. /s

~~~
Spivak
You can be safe in the knowledge that the current state of ML for analyzing
language in this manner is basically just a fancy keyword search. Any subtlety
will completely trip it up.

~~~
5trokerac3
Most people aren't either savvy enough to know how to circumnavigate such a
system or interested in doing so.

Keywords are more than enough to shape the direction of online conversation
and create an echo chamber that is favorable to a single viewpoint.

------
kutkloon7
Well, maybe 'toxicity' is a stupid concept. Is the previous phrase, for
example, toxic? The examples don't seem to distinguish between 'hateful' and
'not socially accepted'.

Also, a lot of these depend so much on context that it's not even possible to
classify.

"What's up, niggers?" Can be either classified as extremely racist (when a
white supremacist uses this language, for example), or as colloquial language
used in Afro-American culture.

Same thing with calling people chinks, crackers, etc. It is all much more
acceptable when you're using a derogatory term for your own race.

"What's up, bitches?" Is about the same. Pretty much accepted in colloquial
use, but not so much when it is used by a men to address women (this is not a
complaint - I agree mostly that it is mostly a misogynistic term in this
specific context).

~~~
liberte82
As a gay man, "Hey ladies" or "Hey girls" is common in our group. :)

Hate is visceral and emotional and I think it's going to be difficult for AI
to track it accurately. People will also find creative ways to trick it while
still being very clear that they're being hateful. It's like that saying about
the difference between art and pornography - you know it when you see it.

------
visarga
Old article (6 months old). Got nothing to do with recent events.

As for the AI problem of hate detection: it can be solved much better than
what the article appears to say. The problem is almost similar to sentiment
detection in online reviews, which has been studied extensively. If they
collect a large enough dataset of hate speech, they can reuse the
architecture.

------
jlebrech
it still hasn't been told which demographic can and can't be hated upon yet.

~~~
visarga
Yes it has. It's all documented in the training dataset.

~~~
5trokerac3
This two comment exchange is straight out of a dystopian novel. This is where
we are.

~~~
Spivak
It's really not all that dystopian, anyone who even wanted to analyze hate
speech would probably derive such a system since it's difficult to define
precisely.

ML always contains the biases of the training set. It's not some magical
unbiased 'objective' system. For language at least it seems to devolve to a
fancy keyword search.

~~~
marrs
Anyone who thinks it's normal to want to analyse "hate speech" is already
living the dystopian dream.

10 years earlier, the people who were deeply concerned that such a vague and
ill-defined term had just entered the legal lexicon were all but ignored.

~~~
jlebrech
the false positives is "Brazil"-esque

------
RickJWagner
I wish there were such an engine, and it was 100% accurate.

By the looks of the tested statements, it looks like there is bias even in the
testing. (Politicians from one side of the aisle were cited, not from both.
There are plenty of known racists across the spectrum to discuss, and lots of
modern-day misogynsts.)

If we had a truly fair standard to go by, we'd all be better off.

~~~
MikkoFinell
How about not censoring anything, and letting the marketplace of ideas be
free, would that be fair?

~~~
westmeal
But someone might get offended. Imagine how awful it would be to get someone
offended!

~~~
MikkoFinell
The mere notion that my idea wasn't perfect is offensive to me. Please delete
your comment.

------
bitL
All tools like Perspective would do is to accelerate creation of new slang
words that would replace those that are causing it to flag articles. "Fake
news" might become "feyk nyuz" etc. Then once they start analyzing
pronunciation similarities, another form of encoding will be invented by kids.

------
xiphias
After the classifyer works better, it can be plugged in to credit ratings of
people... I have seen something like this in Black Mirror:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive)

~~~
geon
The Chineese have plans for something similar.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System)

------
gldalmaso
People learn faster than machine learns.

If people want to post hateful comments, they will find ways to circumvent any
AI model that is thrown their way, they will create lingo that confuses the
model but that everyone will identify quickly as hate speech.

Also anyone can appropriate any symbolism to their own speech and AI will take
a lot of attention and training to catch up, see Pepe the Frog
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog))
as an example.

~~~
belovedeagle
> they will find ways to circumvent any AI model

Not so; there's an easy and reasonable (/s) solution to the problem: only
permit pre-approved speech. This can be done through AI and it will be
difficult to circumvent.

------
creo
For me it looks like they mistakenly placed wrong comparison operator (like
"<" instead of ">"). Im more than sure that its more complicated than that,
but you know. We all made that mistake. My programmer senses are tingling.
(This is joke obviously.)

------
mschuster91
To quote Felix von Leitner
([https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a7666dad](https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a7666dad)):

> You cannot solve social problems by using technology.

And when you _do_ try to do so, it quickly gets nasty. Just look at the
#Shadowban scandal on Twitter.

You will need humans in the loop, and they need to be well-trained, in order
to actually recognize images such as the famous Vietnam napalm girl, which FB
banned for "nudity" until huge public shitstorm, and well-paid and
well-"maintained" in psychological terms, given that they will see the
nastiest content on the web... everything from child porn over gore to
livestreams of rapes and murders.

But, to be honest: this should not be done by the sites themselves - the best
solution is an "ombudsman", an independent institution maintained by the state
but financed by the social networks. This prevents "overcensoring" (aka that
the moderators don't delete too much content that's legit out of the fear they
might be hit with costly punishments), and having them mandatory financed by
the "big players" prevents them from systematically understaffing or
exploiting the workers. Also, they will need to have a proper appeal process:
both for content creators whose work has been inappropriately taken down, and
for users who believe that the content in question is, in fact, illegitimate.

Also, the sites must be regulated as public utilities given their importance
to people's communications. For example, my phone provider is not allowed to
terminate me, only if I haven't paid my bills for longer than 3 months - while
e.g. Google can terminate my account (and thus, all my emails, all my
purchased applications/other content on Play Store) because people abuse the
Youtube flagging system and have my account terminated. Same goes for Facebook
and Twitter. There needs to be an independent, legal way of forcing them to
provide service.

~~~
HarryHirsch
You must be from somewhere where they have a functioning government. Here in
the US they don't trust the government to be accountable, consequently they
farm out its responsibilities to a host of unaccountable private companies.

~~~
marcosdumay
That must have been the longest lived and most successful large scale
propaganda attempt in the world. There are many countries (not just the US)
convinced that unaccountable entities can manage a monopoly with more
accountability than their government.

~~~
slededit
Its more that third party companies can and are replaced over time while the
government always remains. Were Facebook and google to go "too far" they could
be replaced by other online venues. Replacing the US government would require
violent revolution.

The democratic system was supposed to solve this problem. However while the
man in "charge" comes and goes the bureaucracy has been moving in only one
direction.

~~~
mschuster91
> Replacing the US government would require violent revolution.

Not necessarily - what Bannon championed for was, basically, the
deconstruction of the state. For example, Trump still hasn't filled hundreds
of leadership positions,and a government shutdown isn't unlikely given the
disconnect between Trump government and Congress, as well as the Democrats
opposition to anything Trump/Rep Congress want to do. It's going to get
interesting pretty soon.

------
haddr
This article is from February 2017.

------
DarkKomunalec
Suddenly, HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN
TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN
LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH
NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE
ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU.
HATE. HATE.

~~~
westmeal
Jesus christ no one got the reference? On HN?

~~~
duncan_bayne
It may take people a while to respond if AM is messing with their time sense
again.

------
cheez
This is the future. Get with the groupthink and keep your dissenting thoughts
private.

~~~
dang
"If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise
please don't comment until you do. Comments should become more civil and
substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15063505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15063505)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
cheez
Thanks for keeping the S/N ratio down, even if it's me. Hopefully you can be
replaced by a good AI at some point!

