Lauren's Blog: "Don't (For Now) Use Google's New 'Perspective' Comment Filtering Tool"

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
> Date: February 23, 2017 at 11:57:58 AM EST
> To: nnsquad () nnsquad org
> Subject: [ NNSquad ] Lauren's Blog: "Don't (For Now) Use Google's New 'Perspective' Comment Filtering Tool"
>
>
> Don't (For Now) Use Google's New "Perspective" Comment Filtering Tool
>
> https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/02/23/dont-for-now-use-googles-new-perspective-comment-filtering-tool
>
> I must be brief today, so I'll keep this relatively short and get into
> details in another post. Google has announced (with considerable
> fanfare) public access to their new "Perspective" comment filtering
> system API, which uses Google's machine learning/AI system to
> determine which comments on a site shouldn't be displayed due to
> perceived high spam/toxicity scores. It's a fascinating effort. And if
> you run a website that supports comments, I urge you not to put this
> Google service into production, at least for now.
>
> The bottom line is that I view Google's spam detection systems as
> currently too prone to false positives -- thereby enabling a form of
> algorithm-driven "censorship" (for lack of a better word in this
> specific context) -- especially by "lazy" sites that might accept
> Google's determinations of comment scoring as gospel.
>
> In fact, Google's track record in this context remains problematic.
>
> You can see this even from the examples that Google provides, where
> it's obvious that any given human might easily disagree with Google's
> machine-driven comment ranking decisions.
>
> And as someone who deals with significant numbers of comments filtered
> by Google every day -- I have nearly 400K followers on Google+ -- I
> can tell you with considerable confidence that the problem isn't
> "spam" comments that are being missed, it's completely legitimate
> non-spam, nontoxic comments that are inappropriately marked as spam
> and hidden by Google.
>
> Every day, I plow through lots of these (Google makes them relatively
> difficult to find and see), so that I can "resurface" completely
> reasonable comments from good people who have been marked as toxic
> spammers by Google spam detection false positives.
>
> This is a bad situation, and widespread use of "Perspective" at this
> stage of its development would likely spread this problem around the
> world.
>
> For in fact, much worse than letting a spam or toxic comment through,
> is the AI-based muzzling of a comment and commenter who was completely
> innocent and falsely condemned by the machine, where a human would not
> have done so.
>
> "Vanishing" of innocent, legit comments through overaggressive
> algorithms can lead to misunderstandings, confusion, and a general
> lack of trust in AI systems -- and this kind of trust failure can be
> dangerous for users and the industry, since AI's potential for
> greatness toward improving our world is indeed very real.
>
> I'll have more to say about this later, but for now, while you should
> of course feel free to experiment with the Google Perspective API, I
> urge you not to deploy it to any running production systems at this
> time.
>
> --Lauren--
> REPORT Fake News Here! - 



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