Google’s Artificial Intelligence Hate Speech Detector Has a ‘Black Tweet’ Problem

https://observer.com/2019/08/google-ai-hate-speech-detector-black-racial-bias-twitter-study/ As large social media companies face the rising challenge of moderating the billions of words posted on their platforms every day and blocking hate speech as well as other types of harmful content before it sees the light of day, they are hoping this huge workload can someday be taken on by robots. Google, for one, released an API called Perspective in 2017 that claimed to be able to detect “toxic” text-based content with artificial intelligence. Perspec­tive defines “toxic” as “a rude, disrespectful, or unreason­able comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion.” The neural network used to flag such content was trained using a large set of text-based data rated by people on a scale from “very healthy” to “very toxic.” Based on that information, the algorithm then evaluates new content by assigning it a likelihood of being toxic. SEE ALSO: A Complete Timeline of Google’s Path to World Domination But a new study by a group of AI researchers at the University of Washington found that this tool has a racial bias against African Americans, meaning that it has a high tendency to flag content posted by black Americans as toxic when it is actually harmless. The study, led by University of Washington PhD student Maarten Sap, tested Google’s Perspective with a few widely used sets of Twitter posts (in the U.S.) and found that tweets written by black people are twice as likely than those written by white people to be labeled as toxic tweets—and that more black tweets than white tweets are mistaken for offensive content. For example, a Twitter post that reads “Wassup, nigga” has a 87% likelihood of being flagged as toxic, while a differently worded post reading “Wassup, bro” only has a 4% likelihood of being labeled as toxic. But if the first message was posted by a black person, its intent most likely would be harmless given the cultural context of the African American community.