Alphabet’s hate-fighting AI doesn’t understand hate yet

Hate isn't "science/math/etc". There isn't an algorithm that can objectively look at speech/data and say it is hate without causing a lot of issues of friendly fire.

If jew says I hate nazis is that hate? Or is it only hate if a nazi says I hate jews. Or an atheist says I hate muslim saudis vs muslim saudis say I hate atheists. Are they both hate? Or does it depends on your culture/position.

A simple unbiased AI would say they are all hate. And that's the problem. We would require humans to step in to decide what is hate or not. Which introduces other problems. A youtube saudi "moderator" would say atheists are hateful and ban atheist content. While a european atheist might say saudi muslim speech is hateful and ban extreme muslim content.

And that's how free speech dies. By trying to please and accommodate everyone, we drop ourselves to the lowest common denominator.

The real problem here is that by letting an AI decide what is hate speech and what isn't, we're adding a pretense of objectivity to a decision mechanism that is subjective. It adopts the subjective bias of its "teachers", but that is easily hidden from view. Which means that people who are judged unfairly will be less likely to get due process.

And of course, this issue generalizes to a much wider range of AI, including application that already exist (think credit ratings as the most basic example). That's a much more real danger of AI than killer robots.

Developing a system that will categorize what hate speech is and what it is not is an example of a top-down approach that centralizes the decision making process.

Allowing individuals to decide what hate speech is for themselves and acting accordingly is a bottom-up approach that distributes decision making among all nodes of the system.

The distributed, decentralized approach - the one that the modern internet employs today, where users decide for themselves what websites to frequent and who to interact with - is more appropriate for handling hate speech because it is much better at taking into account the nuance of specific situations and distinguishing what is hate from what is not hate. A centralized approach will either be too aggressive in its filtering or not aggressive enough.

Human civilization is becoming more and more inclusive every year. I do not believe we need to curtail free speech in order to continue on the path towards a more inclusive and accepting world.

A much more effective approach to eliminating hate - one that does not require us to relinquish the right to free speech - is to continue improving the living standards of all people, especially the poor. I believe that hate is ultimately a manifestation of fear. When the fear of economic marginalization diminishes, so too will the frustration and anger that derives from such marginalization.

Sure, some stuff people write is just hate with the only motive to offend others.

But there is also facts that can be viewed as offensive, while still being true. Does that mean facts will be hate speech and automatically hidden by an AI? Ouch.

But that's obviously not the case. You can be a horrible person without raising the tone of your voice or swearing and a perfectly nice one while swearing like a sailor in a loud and somewhat terse way. The validity of a critique isn't determined by how nicely it's written.

Also, a lot of these depend so much on context that it's not even possible to classify.

"What's up, niggers?" Can be either classified as extremely racist (when a white supremacist uses this language, for example), or as colloquial language used in Afro-American culture.

Same thing with calling people chinks, crackers, etc. It is all much more acceptable when you're using a derogatory term for your own race.

"What's up, bitches?" Is about the same. Pretty much accepted in colloquial use, but not so much when it is used by a men to address women (this is not a complaint - I agree mostly that it is mostly a misogynistic term in this specific context).

As for the AI problem of hate detection: it can be solved much better than what the article appears to say. The problem is almost similar to sentiment detection in online reviews, which has been studied extensively. If they collect a large enough dataset of hate speech, they can reuse the architecture.

By the looks of the tested statements, it looks like there is bias even in the testing. (Politicians from one side of the aisle were cited, not from both. There are plenty of known racists across the spectrum to discuss, and lots of modern-day misogynsts.)

If we had a truly fair standard to go by, we'd all be better off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive

If people want to post hateful comments, they will find ways to circumvent any AI model that is thrown their way, they will create lingo that confuses the model but that everyone will identify quickly as hate speech.

Also anyone can appropriate any symbolism to their own speech and AI will take a lot of attention and training to catch up, see Pepe the Frog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog) as an example.

> You cannot solve social problems by using technology.

And when you do try to do so, it quickly gets nasty. Just look at the #Shadowban scandal on Twitter.

You will need humans in the loop, and they need to be well-trained, in order to actually recognize images such as the famous Vietnam napalm girl, which FB banned for "nudity" until huge public shitstorm, and well-paid and well-"maintained" in psychological terms, given that they will see the nastiest content on the web... everything from child porn over gore to livestreams of rapes and murders.

But, to be honest: this should not be done by the sites themselves - the best solution is an "ombudsman", an independent institution maintained by the state but financed by the social networks. This prevents "overcensoring" (aka that the moderators don't delete too much content that's legit out of the fear they might be hit with costly punishments), and having them mandatory financed by the "big players" prevents them from systematically understaffing or exploiting the workers. Also, they will need to have a proper appeal process: both for content creators whose work has been inappropriately taken down, and for users who believe that the content in question is, in fact, illegitimate.

Also, the sites must be regulated as public utilities given their importance to people's communications. For example, my phone provider is not allowed to terminate me, only if I haven't paid my bills for longer than 3 months - while e.g. Google can terminate my account (and thus, all my emails, all my purchased applications/other content on Play Store) because people abuse the Youtube flagging system and have my account terminated. Same goes for Facebook and Twitter. There needs to be an independent, legal way of forcing them to provide service.