A small Google subsidiary is set to release an artificial intelligence program aimed at cleaning up abuse and harassment from the internet. Jigsaw’s “Conversation AI” would use machine learning to identify racial slurs and other hostile language, to allow sites the ability to clean up their platforms.
Currently content moderation is very labor intensive and requires humans to manually sift through flagged content. The aim of the project is to develop artificial intelligence that could filter out hate speech without erasing language that simply resembles it. However, when a Wired reporter tried out the software he found he was easily able to fool the AI into thinking phrases like “you suck all the fun out of life” were harassment.
Unsurprisingly, news of this technology angered those with the most to lose from a sanitized web: Internet trolls.
4chan’s /pol/, the Trump-obsessed, white supremacist, meme factory, was quick to respond with a plan to fight back against Google. “Operation Google” would replace racial slurs with Google, in the hopes of appropriating the word like they did with poor Pepe the frog. If the term Google is associated with racism towards black people, Google will be forced to censor themselves, the thinking goes.
A couple of posters were distributed on 4chan and 8chan to rally the troll troops around the cause.
Reddit’s politics subreddit is hard at work editing their racist memes to include references to Google or Skype to refer to Jewish people. The plan has since evolved to include other racial slurs to be replaced by names of other tech entities like Bing and Yahoo.
There’s even a subreddit now for the whole operation, /r/GoogleTown, made to mimic the racist subreddit /r/CoonTown, which was banned from Reddit last year.
Will these trolls be able to turn Google into a racial slur? Will Google have to censor its own name? Will we ever just learn to get along on the Internet without some big tech company stepping in and forcing us to with heavy-handed censorship?
No.
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