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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."
Did the AI get programmed to only target politically incorrect content? Unfortunately double standards for YouTube, Twitter and other sites are all too common. Color me skeptical that this is anything other than an automated political censorship tool.
How does one know if AI is more accurate than humans? If the AI says the video is extremist, and the human says it's not, then who's right? Is there another machine out there that gets to be the arbiter?
The real answer is that there is some human who decided whether a video is extremist, then gave it to both the AI and another human, and the AI was able to learn how to agree better with the 1st human. Unfortunately, that doesn't actually tell us if the video is extremist or if the AI is any good, because the first human isn't more right than the second.