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AI Still Useless at Catching Hate Speech, Research Finds (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the letting-humanity-down dept.

New research has shown just how bad AI is at dealing with online trolls. From a report: Such systems struggle to automatically flag nudity and violence, don't understand text well enough to shoot down fake news and aren't effective at detecting abusive comments from trolls hiding behind their keyboards. A group of researchers from Aalto University and the University of Padua found this out when they tested seven state-of-the-art models used to detect hate speech. All of them failed to recognize foul language when subtle changes were made, according to a paper [PDF] on arXiv. Adversarial examples can be created automatically by using algorithms to misspell certain words, swap characters for numbers or add random spaces between words or attach innocuous words such as 'love' in sentences.

3 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. "Hate crimes" are just crimes by jabberw0k · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Unless there are "happy murders" and "love frauds" ?

    1. Re:"Hate crimes" are just crimes by blindseer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Unless there are "happy murders" and "love frauds" ?

      Murder is by definition unlawful. Homicide on the other hand has four kinds, felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. At least according to Ambrose Bierce. That might equate to (by my estimation at least) murder, manslaughter, self defense, and war.

      I remember a short exchange on the distinction between killing and murder in the movie The Big Red One. In short is that you don't "murder" a Nazi, you kill them, much like one would kill a rabid dog. A sick dog isn't ever murdered because there is no crime in that.

      I hear this a lot, that guns are only good for murder. If that's true then why do we give guns to soldiers and police? Maybe because not every killing of another human is murder. Why would a private citizen want a sidearm? Like the kind any police officer might carry? Maybe because they don't believe that there's such a thing as a "happy murder" and might want to prevent themselves from being murdered by some sick puppy.

      --
      I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
  2. False positive by XXongo · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Not to mention that AIs have the opposite problem as well, tagging innocuous posts as hate speach.

    aka the "Scunthorpe problem".