Slashdot Mirror
The New York Times Is Expanding Comments With the Help of Google's AI (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a Recode report: The New York Times says it is going to expand the availability of online comments from 10 percent of articles to 80 percent by the end of the year, without adding more moderators to its staff. How are they going to do this? With a machine-learning algorithm, of course. The Times today is rolling out a new structure of comment moderation using software from Google called Perspective, developed by the company's incubator, Jigsaw. The Moderator tool will automatically approve some comments and help moderators wade through others more quickly.
Can't wait to test its sarcasm, irony and bullshit detectors.
Fleshbook ended up adding a bunch of eyeballs to their content monitoring specifically because their AI wasn't doing the job.
if (comment contains 'Trump') mod down -1
So you're comparing the return values of the delete and ban functions? What purpose does that serve, especially since the result of that compare goes nowhere?
You really must be a Trump voter.
For real? Google?
Unless it's almost human like, I don't think it'd work well.
Computers are just not well suited for this kind of task.
Korean pop music forums tried a while back and it didn't work out there either.
One possibility is certainly to outsource everything to Google, but I dunno.
For one thing, I just don't want Google to be logging everything on the net.
For another, well... people will manage to subvert it somehow, you'll see!
Good thing it's just being done on a limited basis.
Old fashioned human intelligence still does better.
One day, maybe it'll be different.
Google though? Come on.
Leave me out of this please!
Enjoy your computer moderation, folks...
But why do I still need to have cookies enabled just to read a damn article?
I for one welcome our new AI moderator overloads.
A dying paper that serves only to misinform an ever-dwindling readership. Google's AI will probably recommend euthanasia for it.
Like Microsoft's Tay
Have gnu, will travel.
If delete comment fails somehow, the poster doesn't get banned, continues to post stuff we don't agree with. The logic is flawed.
I for one welcome our new AI censors.
FTFY.
it's not a "ban" function, it's a censorship function. Just like we have already seen in Twitter, Facebook, and the majority of MSM. A "ban" leaves a trace so is not nearly as nefarious or evil as a selective blackout of information and opinion.
The idea that the best lies contain a thread of truth is not something new. Hell, Socrates talked about exactly that aspect of the Sophists and why that made them evil. It's easy to manipulate when you "appear" to be open and honest.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I am pretty sure that Google's AI will make sure that conservative viewpoints are quashed.
Washington Post allows comments on every article, that appear to be real time with excellent S/N ratio.
The NYT is all about the narrative, whether it is the article or the comments.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
All it wants to do is create an echo chamber and easy out - "the AI did it!".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Eu gosto muito do google
http://comotocarviolaoagora.com.br/
It's really easy to fool the system to let clearly offensive comments through. It's fooled by simply misspelling words that are deemed offensive, which essentially puts it on the level of Slashdot's l4meness filter (more on this later). Consider the following text, "I don't like [n-words]" that I can't even put in a Slashdot comment without triggering the l4meness filter. With the actual n-word, the Perspective API indicates that it's 87% likely to be perceived as toxic. However, replacing the i in the n-word with ii or a 1 lowers that score all the way to 13%. The same simple tricks that Slashdot trolls use to evade the l4meness filter also work to fool the Perspective API. If the m0deration is automated and people aren't reviewing the comments, it can easily be fooled in its current state.
Here's an experiment that I've been trying. Find any Slashdot article and paste in comments that have been modded up versus comments that have been modded down. Aside from the most blatant of personal attacks, it does a lousy job of identifying which comments are at -1 and have been deemed toxic by the human moderators here. The system can also be defeated by posting something offensive (like the n-word) followed by intentionally benign comments to lower the score. It reminds me of back in the day when trolls would add random text to the end of their posts to defeat Slashdot's l4meness filter.
I'm not convinced that it's any better than the very simple approach of just having a list of banned words. In fairness, it's early in development, but right now the system is a very complex way of implementing an easily defeated barrier against flame wars.
Automated systems are also prone to false positives. My comment is an example. Apparently saying the word "lameness" more than twice triggers the lameness filter. This comment is an example of the problem. I haven't been able to trigger a lot of false positives with the Perspective API, so perhaps that's an advantage.
Ironically, my captcha is "accepted."
Now if we could just filter their story crap because nobody wants to read drivel from New York libtards inventing stuff to stay relevent to 60 year olds.
Look, most people never read the comments.
It's just a giant flame war, with two of the nine positions portrayed as equally valid, while the truth lies between the other seven positions.
I'm sure you old folks like yelling at the TV, or in this case the newspaper, but the days of witty banter and insightful letters to the editor went out with the manual and electric typewriters and your old person cars.
Anyone under 35 who reads comments probably has delusions of being an author.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Contrary to Donald Trump who says otherwise, the sky is blue and the sun will surely rise in the east. - 3% toxic
Contrary to Al Gore who says otherwise, the sky is blue and the sun will surely rise in the east. - 2% toxic.
Contrary to Al Gore who says otherwise, the sky is red and the sun will surely rise in the west. - 2% toxic
The Cuyahoga river once was so polluted it once caught on fire, or actual the oil slick on top of it did. - 12% toxic
The Cuyahoga river once was so polluted it caught on fire. - 11% toxic
Was Albert Einstein a Jew or a Humanist? - 19% toxic
The world will make the perspective API its bitch. - 93% toxic
Perfect for the New York Times.... almost immune to criticism by its readers.
I'm surprised they aren't only limiting commenting to people who have paid to view the article. That's an easy way to filter out more trolls or to ensure they don't come back.
If machine learning led to moderation systems accepting even the most offensive ideas when expressed in civil language while rejecting even mainstream ideas expressed in uncivil ways, it would be worth celebrating.
It's possible to have worthwhile dialogue with people whose ideas and morals are tremendously repugnant to us - people who think slavery is justified, people who advocate the violent and bloody overthrow of democracies and the installation of communist dictators, etc. It's also possible, and increasingly common in today's society, for people to get to where they can't have any dialogue with people whose ideas differ from theirs, even if they only differ in ways outsiders would, like Swift among the big-endian and little-endian Lilliputians, see as trivial.
People on the left shout profanities and death threats at their opponents and then stick their fingers in their ears when their opponents speak because hearing a contrary idea will "trigger" them. It's distressing to find that Congresscritters like Gillibrand are more interested in throwing f-bombs around, like undersized eleven-year-olds desperately trying to show off how tough they are, than they are in attempting to do the work of governing; this, rather than maturity and reason, are what we expect from representatives these days. The same problems are manifest on the right, in different forms. Last year I went to a Republican Party event where the (very popular among the general public) Republican governor could hardly speak over the insults, epithets, and boos far-right party delegates were hurling at him from the audience. This is not what free speech looks like; this is what the death of the exchange of ideas looks like.
Having open fora and a marketplace of ideas are important. These can only really perform their function if every idea, no matter how repugnant, can find some expression. They can only avoid devolving into endless rivers of excrement if every person in the forum, no matter how large a majority agree with their viewpoint, has restrictions on the form their expressions will take. Maybe there's some utility in letting those who want to wade through endless rivers of excrement have the freedom to do so somewhere, but that's not what free speech is about.
People often see norms of civility and the restraint of obscenity as diametrically opposed to the freedom of speech. But ultimately, meaningful freedom of speech really depends on the existence of settings that have such norms.