Google thinks it can defeat online trolls with AI

Whether you chit-chat in the Internet's nether regions or simply dare to come off as strongly opinionated on social media, chances are there's an army of trolls waiting to make your Internet experience less pleasant. In most cases trolling is just a minor inconvenience, but unfortunately there are a lot of cases where it turns into mass harassment, especially when politics or religion gets involved.

Jigsaw, a small unit of Google, is hoping to make the Internet better by creating a form of artificial intelligence capable of detecting the language of abuse and harassment. Called Conversation AI, the project aims to achieve a much better accuracy than keyword-based filters and a far faster response time than a team of moderators. Full details can be read at Wired, which also details Jigsaw's moonshot goal to eliminate censorship.

Conversation AI represents just one of Jigsaw’s wildly ambitious projects. The New York–based think tank and tech incubator aims to build products that use Google’s massive infra­structure and engineer­ing muscle not to advance the best possibilities of the Internet but to fix the worst of it: surveillance, extremist indoctrination, censorship. The group sees its work, in part, as taking on the most intract­able jobs in Google’s larger mission to make the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.”