"Perspective or censorship? Google shares AI designed to fight online trolling"

rt.com

"Google has released to developers the source code to Perspective, a new machine tool designed to flag 'toxic comments' online. Its creators hope the AI will clean up internet debate, but critics fear it will lead to censorship instead.

Perspective was created by Jigsaw and Google’s Counter Abuse Technology team – both subsidiaries of Google’s parent company Alphabet – in a collaborative research project called Conversation-AI. Its mission is to build technology to deal with problems ranging from 'online censorship to countering violent extremism to protecting people from online harassment.'

Jigsaw has partnered with online communities and publishers to measure the 'toxicity' of comments, including the New York Times, Wikipedia, Guardian and the Economist.

'This gives them (news sites and social media) a new option: Take a bunch of collective intelligence – that will keep getting better over time – about what toxic comments people have said would make them leave, and use that information to help your community discussions,' said CJ Adams, product manager of Google’s Conversation AI, according to WIRED.

Until now, for news sites and social media trying to rein in comments 'the options have been upvotes, downvotes, turning off comments altogether or manually moderating,' Adams said.

Twitter and Facebook also have recently announced anti-trolling moves.

On a demonstration website launched Thursday, anyone could type a phrase into Perspective’s interface to instantaneously see how it rates on the 'toxicity' scale.

RT America tested the AI with some comments from our own website. Type 'he is a Communist with a Jew nose' into its text field, and Perspective will tell you it has a 77 percent similarity to phases people consider toxic."