Google Says AI Better Than Humans At Scrubbing Extremist YouTube Content (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Google has pledged to continue developing advanced programs using machine learning to combat the rise of extremist content, after it found that it was both faster and more accurate than humans in scrubbing illicit content from YouTube. The company is using machine learning along with human reviewers as part of a mutli-pronged approach to tackle the spread of extremist and controversial videos across YouTube, which also includes tougher standards for videos and the recruitment of more experts to flag content in need of review. A YouTube spokesperson said: "While these tools aren't perfect, and aren't right for every setting, in many cases our systems have proven more accurate than humans at flagging videos that need to be removed. Our initial use of machine learning has more than doubled both the number of videos we've removed for violent extremism, as well as the rate at which we've taken this kind of content down. Over 75% of the videos we've removed for violent extremism over the past month were taken down before receiving a single human flag."

Comments

Re:How is accuracy measured?

[Kjella]

I would imagine that Google has some content policy experts who are making up the rules of what's acceptable and not. And then a whole lot of whack-a-mole workers trying to police by those rules. I guess that doesn't say if the expert is right, but the AI is doing the leg work more consistently in line with policy than the people. If you let say 5% through to a second opinion by humans or if there's some sort of appeal process there should be a pretty continuous learning. Though I suspect the AI will completely fail to understand parody or other use of extremist elements in a non-extremist way.