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

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.

Comments

No such thing as "hate speech"

[Alypius]

How do you catch something that doesn't exist?

Re: No such thing as "hate speech"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate is very subjective. Trying to define it as "protecting minorities" means in your world, it's acceptable for a minority to say mean things about the majority, but if someone in the majority says the exact same thing about someone in the minority, it's not. That's not equality. Then we get to global demographics and what might be a minority in a locale, is actually a majority in the global context. This is insanity and a political construct.

In reality what we have in the US at this time is a bunch of SJWs labeling any speech they don't like as "hate speech". The term is being used as a political weapon, not as an actual betterment of society. It's being used to silence opinions, often when the side silencing has no coherent argument. Someone says X and the other person with no counter argument screams BIGOT!

At the end of the day, words are just words. We decide how much power to give them. If we decide that something is hateful and should never be said, it becomes very powerful. If you just decide that anyone that says something is an ignorant fool and ignore them, those same words lose power. What is powerful is freedom of speech. Changes to society only happen when unpopular things are allowed to be said. Many of those are not improvements, but out of that muck, the good things rise up. Freedom of speech does not exist to ensure people can say uncontroversial things, it exists to allow opposition and controversial opinions to have a chance to live and evolve. Without that, we stagnate as a people.

I don't need your protection.

[Harvey Manfrenjenson]

I've somehow managed to get by for many years without any algorithms to "protect" me from speech. So here's my message to the inventors of this algorithm: I'd love it if you would fuck right off, OK? Thanks and have a great day!