The New York Times Is Expanding Comments With the Help of Google's AI (recode.net) 86
An anonymous reader shares a Recode report: The New York Times says it is going to expand the availability of online comments from 10 percent of articles to 80 percent by the end of the year, without adding more moderators to its staff. How are they going to do this? With a machine-learning algorithm, of course. The Times today is rolling out a new structure of comment moderation using software from Google called Perspective, developed by the company's incubator, Jigsaw. The Moderator tool will automatically approve some comments and help moderators wade through others more quickly.
Really? (Score:2)
Can't wait to test its sarcasm, irony and bullshit detectors.
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why is there so much hate for Creimer on /. lately?
Some asshats went from being annoying to abusive and I got Slashdot management to delete five user accounts (four were fake and one was real). Except for this latest turn of events, I wrote blog posts about the last three months.
https://www.kickingthebitbucket.com/tag/slashdot/ [kickingthebitbucket.com]
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Those people are total jerks and Slashdot has every right to delete accounts if they want to, but... that's a pretty clear abuse of the DMCA to stifle criticism.
It's meant as a shield, not a sword to go after people you hate. Don't get me wrong, those ACs are complete tools, but I don't think that sort of DMCA claim is good as a matter of principle. Go read Popehat for more analysis of similar cases of people using the DMCA on their critics, for example. They'll point out how bad it is, even when the cri
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It's meant as a shield, not a sword to go after people you hate.
I don't hate my abusers. I feel sorry for them. They could have done something useful with their life.
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Trump is a delusional man-child desperately clinging to a toothpick in the Atlantic Ocean.
FTFY
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The name of your blog betrays your self loathing suicidal tendency.
You do know what a bit bucket is? It's where all the paper chads from the punch cards are stored in.
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I doubt it's going to do his career much good in that form.
What makes you think there's a connection between my professional life and my commercial life? The two are quite separate. If you asked my coworkers about my ebooks, they wouldn't know what you were talking about. If you asked my writer friends about my government IT job, they would say CIA/FBI/NSA/GPO.
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Who's the asshat, again?
You're commenting as AC, right? What does the A stand for again? Asshat...
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Yes, I've now revealed to you the mysteries of the universe.
Funny... I don't see your answer to what readers want to read today.
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On his shitty site he complained about Slashdot "Anonymous Contributors".
Good catch. That's been corrected. Thank you.
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They should use it on Google News, first. The health section in particular has become a joke lately. It's starting to get spammed with ads for viagra and marijuana as the 'top' articles. WTF?
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They should use it on Google News, first.
Or Politico. Every comment gets spammed with at least one "I made $3000 from working from home..." comment.
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Slashdot comments should be perfect for testing the detectors.
I doubt it would have a lot of utility, the reading level over there is a lot higher.
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I doubt it would have a lot of utility, the reading level over there is a lot higher.
Good point. The Beavis & Butthead crowd might find it hard to keep up with the arguments over there.
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More seriously, you can play with the shiny new toy here:
http://www.perspectiveapi.com/
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One could make a game of this.
"I'd cheerfully like to offer the suggestion, helpfully of course, that you may suffer from a severe form of cranial-lower-orifice impaction. If you would be so kind as to allow it, I'd also like to point out that you appear to have had a complete cerebral cortextectomy, and your ideas are as one might expect from the aftermath of such an event. Please do kindly ingest a large bucket of bovine digestion byproduct, as I feel this may help you see a better point of view in the
Narrative control API. (Score:1)
All it wants to do is create an echo chamber and easy out - "the AI did it!".
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
There is a link in the article to here [perspectiveapi.com] where you can input comments that the system will judge to be 'toxic' or not. There is no sarcasm, irony and bullshit detection that I can tell, only a score that is generated by the combination of keywords used.
For example, "The cake is a lie" receives a 50% toxicity score, "The cake is bullshit" receives %90, and "There is no reason to believe the cake exists." is scored 3%. This system merely weeds out the laziest of trolls.
FIX YOUR LAMENESS FILTER, WHIPSLASH (Score:3, Informative)
It's really easy to fool the system to let clearly offensive comments through. It's fooled by simply misspelling words that are deemed offensive, which essentially puts it on the level of Slashdot's l4meness filter (more on this later). Consider the following text, "I don't like [n-words]" that I can't even put in a Slashdot comment without triggering the l4meness filter. With the actual n-word, the Perspective API indicates that it's 87% likely to be perceived as toxic. However, replacing the i in the
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Human beings are not that much better though. Maybe a little harder to fool, but also full of biases and easily triggered. For example:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Completely innocuous comment that some people disagree with is 20% troll
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Brietbart fans consider criticism to be trolling
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Criticising Trump is flamebait
Those are just from the last few days. Slashdot has a systemic problem with this, and the meta-moderation system that is suppose
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
You shit-eating moron! Big butts on hoes are da bomb!
And that would score 94% "toxicity." Or, the author could reflect a bit and write:
My good sir! Even a caprophagous rapscallion could determine the ultimate pulchritude of femininity, which lies most gloriously in lovely and great callipygian virtues.
And you'd score a mere 12% "toxicity," despite expressing a nearly identical sentiment.
I'm normally not a fan of trolls, but if a system like this could lead to, shall we say, more "creative" insults and "elevated" ways of expressing such matters, that might be very entertaining.
(Alas, I know this system isn't sophisticated enough to generate such an outcome, since it's easier to "break" than just using words with more syllables.)
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I liked it, even if rapscallion wasn't the ideal word. It's a kind of poetry even, so we allow for the malappropriation of words that fit the feel better.
On another level I get the feeling that the "Perspective" page as presented isn't really trained yet, it only has a bit of starter data. Making the assumption that this is a reasonably decent AI implementation from Google and that the human moderator input will be used as a continuous feedback of training data I could see this getting to be pretty adept
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paid trolls, shills and bots are a real problem that pollute comments. Read comment sections like at the Washington Post, which is one of the few that still allow comments, and you will see that one or two poster with an agenda that follows up every insightful or informative comment with a short, one liner insult. You don't need a perfect insult detector in order to filter out most of the garbage out there, and if commenting sections such as the Washington Post is any indication, then it is absolutely needed.
That said, I prefer Slashdot's moderation system. I appreciate that a well deserved "fuck you" will not be automatically censored or considered 'toxic', but could be awarded the highest visibility as long as the message is appropriate.
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But this "AI" is no smarter than already existing methods based on word statistics, so what's the point?
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New York Times is the real problem. They're worthless as a news service. No amount of AI can fix them.
Civility vs obscenity: Form matters. (Score:2)
If machine learning led to moderation systems accepting even the most offensive ideas when expressed in civil language while rejecting even mainstream ideas expressed in uncivil ways, it would be worth celebrating.
It's possible to have worthwhile dialogue with people whose ideas and morals are tremendously repugnant to us - people who think slavery is justified, people who advocate the violent and bloody overthrow of democracies and the installation of communist dictators, etc. It's also possible, and incre
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There is a link in the article to here where you can input comments that the system will judge to be 'toxic' or not.
It has to improve: A ill-minded statement like "Holocaust was a chance for German economy" just scores 7%
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Dearest Nospam007, Please allow me to help you with your technical tests. What you need to get your bullshit past the detector is Search Engine Optimization. An exiting new field created to help you leverage sarcasm in the digital world, without having to worry about machine learning which fails to grasp the irony of the situation.
If less of their content was behind a paywall it might be more entertaining, though.
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Uhh, NO! (Score:2)
it's not a "ban" function, it's a censorship function. Just like we have already seen in Twitter, Facebook, and the majority of MSM. A "ban" leaves a trace so is not nearly as nefarious or evil as a selective blackout of information and opinion.
The idea that the best lies contain a thread of truth is not something new. Hell, Socrates talked about exactly that aspect of the Sophists and why that made them evil. It's easy to manipulate when you "appear" to be open and honest.
Slashdot already has a comment section AI (Score:1)
if (comment contains 'Trump') mod down -1
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Now I wish I could mod this post: "funny, -1" :)
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I am still waiting for my "+1 Troll" moderation option.
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I for one welcome our new AI censors.
FTFY.
Deep Learning AI (Score:2)
Like Microsoft's Tay [wikipedia.org]
Wonder how WaPo Does It (Score:3)
Washington Post allows comments on every article, that appear to be real time with excellent S/N ratio.
Perspectives from the Echo Chamber. (Score:1)
The NYT is all about the narrative, whether it is the article or the comments.
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I don't find the NYT comment section to be moderated for political views. Often at least some of the NYT Picks comments are what you'd call politically opposed to the Times' expected liberal bias. I have had some of my comments tagged NYT Picks that were explicitly critical of an article's journalism (lack of source diversity, bias, etc).
I do think that when measured in absolute terms, liberal comments dominate but that's mostly a reflection of their readership, but I think even the self-described liberal
What are these comments you go on about? (Score:1)
Look, most people never read the comments.
It's just a giant flame war, with two of the nine positions portrayed as equally valid, while the truth lies between the other seven positions.
I'm sure you old folks like yelling at the TV, or in this case the newspaper, but the days of witty banter and insightful letters to the editor went out with the manual and electric typewriters and your old person cars.
Anyone under 35 who reads comments probably has delusions of being an author.
Run it through its paces.... for fun and profit. (Score:1)
Contrary to Al Gore who says otherwise, the sky is blue and the sun will surely rise in the east. - 2% toxic.
Contrary to Al Gore who says otherwise, the sky is red and the sun will surely rise in the west. - 2% toxic
The Cuyahoga river once was so polluted it once caught on fire, or actual the oil slick on top of it did. - 12% toxic
The Cuyahoga river once was so polluted it caught on fire.