
New York Times: Using AI to Host Better Conversations - danso
https://www.blog.google/topics/machine-learning/new-york-times-using-ai-host-better-conversations/
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samfriedman
The linked post is itself linked to the API in question: Perspective [0].

The site has a demo where you can slide the "toxicity" from left to right and
view the resulting bucket of comments sourced from various topics of
discussion (Brexit, Climate Change, US Elections). You can also provide your
own snippet and get a rating.

Obviously this kind of tool will sustain a lot of discussion about what
"toxicity" is and how a ML system could infringe on speech by applying bias,
either from the engineers building and evaluating the system, or from the
inherent bias in data that Google themselves have already identified as a
major problem. [1] For what it's worth, Perspective's site offers a definition
of "toxic": "a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to
make you leave a discussion." The training dataset was ostensibly built by
having humans rate comments on a toxicity scale based on that definition.

It seems as though the idea is to penalize poorly thought-out or inflammatory
comments while encouraging in-depth or at least more measured responses. I
think we can all agree that that is an attractive system to build: the main
question will be if it can be done in a fair way and what latent problems
might exist in such a system.

[0] [https://www.perspectiveapi.com/](https://www.perspectiveapi.com/)

[1] [https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-
mod...](https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-models-
contain-bias.html)

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rubbsdecvik
This is an interesting project for sure, and I see some great potential. I
tried out a few phrases, including the one below that include commonly used
words in "toxic" comments, but are not actually insulting anyone. This still
had a high score (0.74).

> Unfortunately, most Americans are ignorant of the science about climate
> change. This is not because they are stupid but rather because they do not
> have all the data, or the data they have is unreliable.

I'm in no way saying this is the best way to communicate that message, and
this could prompt a writer to re-phrase, but I don't know if I'd claim that
this is toxic. I think that this could be a good tool, but it's clearly highly
dependent on "common" understandings of words rather than actual definitions.
Maybe that's the correct trade off though.

Edit: Forgot the score.

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John_KZ
Great. If the internet was mission one thing, that would be Google's AI
moderating every single comment section on all independent websites. In
Google's cyberspace, nobody can hear you scream.

