Perspective

Perspective

Technology to fight abuse online, new from Alphabet

5.0
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36 followers

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Launch Team
AssemblyAI
AssemblyAI
Build voice AI apps with a single API
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What do you think? …

Ryan Hoover
Interesting project from Jigsaw (an Alphabet company) which uses tech to scaleable fight online abuse. It's currently in beta but they've worked with a few big partners like Wikipedia and NYT. In the meantime, Scale might be a good solution for those that need human oversight over internet abuse. cc @lucy_guo
Mubashar Iqbal
@rrhoover So cool that they are working on this with other companies, the more content they have to analyze the better. Definitely needs to be in the API topic.
Douglas Evaristo
Esbjörn Guwallius
Just tested the "toxicness" of some names... Donald Trump 22%, Barack Obama 16%, Hillary Clinton 5%, Bernie Sanders 4%.
Alex Greene
@guwallius Proper nouns by themselves should not have a grade, that doesn't make sense.
Bob
I'm afraid this will lead to (perhaps accidental) censorship. For example, when I typed "Liberals are not stupid" it said that it was 93% toxic.
Stedman Halliday
@ninjinka I don't think the intent of the tech is stringent auto-moderation (at least right now). As it stands presently, the API seems a lot more suitable for things along the lines of assisting human moderators in quickly identifying potentially unsavory comments (for more focused and lower-effort moderation) as well as preemptively preventing toxic comments by increasing conscientiousness during composition. Maybe we'll see a really powerful auto-moderator once the model is polished enough.
Bob
@stedman_rh Yeah, I think that is the intent currently, but I can see lazy mods just auto-deleting anything over a certain threshold.
o(^^Q)
@ninjinka Also, I think it gives you an opportunity to write something better. "Liberals are not stupid" may not appear toxic, but it actually is poor framing (and one that will automatically cause defensiveness). You might write: "Liberals want ______" or "Liberals are aware that ___________" or "Liberals believe in _________" I don't think we should think of comments in isolation as toxic or not, but also in their ability to prevent future toxic responses too.
Niv Dror
🙏
Jordan Fourcher
This is dangerous. A program, trained by wikipedia and the nyt out of all people, shouldn't be able to censor or block people's minds and thoughts. The intention is good, but unfortunately abuse had been a thing ever since we could speak to each other
Haythem Haddad
No thanks Alphabet, we don't need tools to enforce corporatist censorship.
Cody
@haythem Totally agree!
Illia Strikhar
The intention is good, but it may end up in bad places. I get that you're trying to make internet discussions more meaningful. But if the technology becomes good enough it may spread. For example, imagine CEO's setting up Slack so that coworkers can't chat about anything but work. That would kill creativity. People aren't robots, they need an occasional chitchat.
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