Google's troll-destroying AI can't cope with typos

Details

I'd like to see the difference (if any) between "S c r e w you Trump supporters" and "B l e s s you Trump supporters". I suspect they are identical.

Not only that but it seems biased towards Hillary as well!!

Personally I feel the words "moron" and "idiot" to carry the same weight on the Toxicity scales.

I AM from the UK, so my tolerance of swearwords is probably higher than that found in the New world or amount the other lesser countries. These are words taught in reception and primary education to give our British children a good platform on which to build their vocabulary.

But I digress, how can calling a Trump supporter a "moron" only get a score of 80% Whilst calling a Hillary supporter an "idiot" gains 90% toxicity!?

Ugh

Those deliberate mis-spellings look like the toxic sludge that the #DMReporter keeps pointing out.

Is a bunch of regular expressions an AI now?

Benign settings

"Machine learning models are generally designed to yield the best performance on clean data and in benign settings."

While that may generally be the case, you'd hope software specifically written to detect non-benign situations would avoid assuming benevolence.

"to provide an automated way to detect "toxic" language in social media"

Might I ask... Why?

Will I now have the pleasure of being reported to her majesty's finest automatically whenever I tell someone to f-ck off and call them a moron on social media?

How do they define social media? Facebeook? Twitter? Message boards? Comments sections?

At what point does saying "I disagree" become a punishable offence?

Must be based on the Gmail spellchecker...

Given that the spellchecker in Gmail has often no suggestion to make when a letter is missing or swapped or mis-accented in a word, this should be no suprise. Haters can keep on hating safely.

I wonder what it would score "spawny-eyed parrot-faced wazzock"

https://youtu.be/I2AcJSkUw6M?t=1m18s

You don't even need swearwords to troll some people.

Some people are so lacking in terms of intelligence that you can criticise them to their face and any AI would be none the wiser to pick it up.

Willie Bee

Google AI: the real reason he's William the Conqueror.

Analbuddy hoo votted gogg.le iz.za wasteof.space

No deprecation intended, just wanted to raise the spectre of insulting terms also being possible to interpret as links, and th.us triggering different automation modules in filter.space

Bah!

So El Reg's articles about Yahoo should still get indexed by headline in the Google search results then.

Isn't there a way to remove ..

characters that are not alphanumeric?

Just sayimg.

Nationalism(ist) is flagged?

Pisses me off that the word is flagged at all, this is the crap they are using on Reddit, Twitter, and FB right now to flag anyone who isn't a globalist shill. Sorry that people aren't like Germany who are afraid to wave their OWN flag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rcc7xgD2dM

Or declared the Christmas Market Terror attack an "Accident".. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/773602/Germany-Berlin-Christmas-market-compensation-terror-ISIS-attack-Fabrizio-Di-Lorenzo-lorry

I'm just happy that...

El Reg doesn't have such filters on stories or comments.

I suspect that there are subjects that get 80%-90% ratings in either comments or the stories.

Of course :-) I would never get such a score.........

Trolls?? Nah, wouldn't happen here :-).

Not much point in this anyway

As has been said, most forums have filters to block the obvious and the less obvious (forum mods know the language of their posters generally, with all its variation in spelling) add to this that the MOST abusive posts are generally in pretty good English, not requiring any swearing or nasty words.

The idea is to hurt the person you are trolling, and generally this is accomplished by making them feel small, physical size doesn't come into it, therefore the attacker can generally beat their target into submission by putting a post that is just "better written" than the target can respond too. (case of the small people being able to pick their battlefield and attack from a position of strength)

Check out some of the threads on E lReg for examples, those in the lower leagues tend to be left looking like the only surviving brain transplant donor by those who can string a few non-swearing insults together.

And then we have the final issue with language and words having their meaning changed or just having an generally accepted double meaning, those mugs at the AI lab will have a hard time working out whats an actual attack by only looking at the language being used. (see what I did there? English is great for this kind of thing)

Syntax and placement of words are almost as important as the words being used themselves. but I guess that is the point in using this as a training ground for an AI, after all a self learning system would come out of this exercise either totally broken and crying or able to work for IGN forums as a mod.