19 ms·

Something alluded to here is that many of the Languages models use US English. Many terms that are offensive in the US, may not be offensive at all in the UK. e

Something alluded to here is that many of the Languages models use US English. Many terms that are offensive in the US, may not be offensive at all in the UK. e.g. "Fag" in the UK is frequently used to refer to cigarettes. "Can I bum a fag?" literally means "Can I have one of your cigarettes please?". Similarly something that might be a cat call such as "Get your baps out" (shows us your breasts), could also be used by a baker since a "bap" is a type of bread roll in a slightly cheeky advert as most people are aware of the pun. How are you going to train an AI to know the context that the person might be talking about bread instead of a woman? Has anyone realised yet that almost all of this folly? I suppose not when there is money to be made.

vidarh 5y ago
> How are you going to train an AI to know the context that the person might be talking about bread instead of a woman? For starters, you can't unless you actually include the context in the training set. Then again, a lot of humans won't successfully manage that either...
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > For starters, you can't unless you actually include the context in the training set. It's worse than that. The context doesn't just have to be in the training set. It also has to be available on the other end, when you're using the model to make a determination. And it isn't. Which is why even human censors can't get it right. The parties communicating can, and almost always do, have external shared state that The Decider doesn't. Which gives the same words different meaning. Imagine hearing an inside joke you're on the outside of and then being asked to adjudicate whether it was offensive.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Sure, but you do have extra context you can make available on both ends, but that I'm assuming most don't even try to include. E.g. if judging tweets for example you'd presumably do a lot better if you evaluated the tweets in context of followers and in context of past tweets - both recent and the accounts history. E.g. an account that posts white supremacy tweets regularly is likely to mean something entirely different if RT'ing a BLM tweet with "that is fucking awesome" than what someone with #BLM in their profile is likely to mean. Part of the problem is that they're throwing away a huge amount of the state they do in fact have. But I absolutely agree it's in general an unsolvable issue - I pointed to a story from my childhood elsewhere showing how trivially people cause problems for "The Decider": A childhood friend being forced not to call his brother names and switching to using names of cheeses. Is "Edam" an insult or a food preference? You can't know without context. And it needs to be very local context, because humans very quickly pick up on when you just start using a word to mean something else, so it doesn't even need to be any shared external state about the word, just a shared understanding of where the receiver might expect an insult coupled with an unexpected response that will then easily get labelled an insult. That unexpected term might well in itself be positive if the receiver expects criticism. "Awesome" and "I love it!" are perfectly good insults when the other party has just told you something where the appropriate response would be negative, for example.
    - pph 5y ago
      That reminds me of Chinese online censorship / banning of words, which lead to people using homoglyphs or homophones.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      > E.g. if judging tweets for example you'd presumably do a lot better if you evaluated the tweets in context of followers and in context of past tweets - both recent and the accounts history. Must never use followers. Or anything else the account holder has no control over. Otherwise you'll end up with the same kind of SEO problems where competitors and foreign governments create fake accounts to follow or interact with disfavored ones and destroy their algorithmic reputation. Guilt by association in general is malice. Someone who regularly interacts with white supremacists might be a white supremacist -- and maybe 90% of them are -- but it could also be someone criticizing, mocking or debunking them. And if it gets out that the algorithm is penalizing people for doing that, they'll stop. Which is very bad.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        Even using who an account follows incentivizes echo chambers, more than they already are. I specifically follow a few locals that I would often notice upset with the same politicians that I was, but for diametrically different reasons. Even though I disagree with them on most everything, I find value in having a few of those voices on my feed visibly attached to a consistent person. It helps me to resist seeing the "other side" as just an impersonal sea of voices.
- echen 5y ago
  > For starters, you can't unless you actually include the context in the training set. 100%. It's crazy how often context is missing from datasets! We wrote a separate blog post recently about this too: https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/why-context-aware-datasets-are-crucial-for-data-centric-ai https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/why-context-aware-datasets-are-c...
s3tz 5y ago
With companies like that, at the end of the day they only really answer to shareholders so every problem is a nail.
- Gareth321 5y ago
  So we hope that customers eventually stop using their services, hurting their bottom line. I've been following some drama in chat/user interaction in modern games. People are getting banned in Forza Horizon 5 for funny decals. One guy got an 8,000 year ban for a Kim Jong-un KFC paint job (https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article25686363.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_PAY-Kim-Jong-un-Forza1.jpg https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article25686363.ece...). EA is banning entire accounts - access to ALL games on an account - for swearing in Apex Legends. All of the major studios are in the process of severely restricting and even removing chat in their games. The latest Battlefield 2042 game doesn't even have voice chat, and they removed the global scoreboard altogether because they didn't want poorly performing players to know how poorly they were performing. The list goes on and on. To me, this is all a serious reduction in the enjoyment I have in games. I grew up playing Counter Strike, and s**-talking and competing was a big part of the experience. I just won't play games where I'm not allowed to interact with other players.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    The market will solve that. People will stop giving crazy companies money when their products become "not fun". See: Battlefield 2042 failing pretty hard. That being said: I specifically only buy entertainment products that do NOT require me to listen to some 14-year-old describing sexual activity with my female family members in great detail because his nonexistent skills make me keep winning. Different strokes for different blokes.
  - aardvark179 5y ago
    The whole thing about shit talking in games was also the reason I never wanted to play most of them, and why games like Journey were so refreshing. At some point games companies were bound to notice the ways voice chat limited their market and remove it.
eecc 5y ago
That’s why you introduce USA-style puritan PoCo. there are enough trigger happy people with less understanding than an AI, all eager to kick enough rages to wear down a saint…
js8 5y ago
> Has anyone realised yet that almost all of this folly? This guy did: https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU Humans are inventing double-entendres to create the ambiguity.
mdoms 5y ago
I have been banned from a subreddit for using the word "cunt" in an affectionate way. We must not let Americans design these models.
Gareth321 5y ago
I couldn't agree more. I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. It seems that an absence of malintent in language is no longer sufficient defense. If one perceives the language as offensive, it is. This is an absurd standard because with a sufficient audience size, someone will find something offensive. This standard is a de facto end to all discussion. It only takes one hyper sensitive audience member (legitimate or troll) to shut down all discussion. This is not a sustainable strategy for society. It is of course impossible for algorithms to parse perceived intent by the lowest common denominator, and attempting to do so is nothing more than defensive legal posturing.
- watwut 5y ago
  Because "intent" rule was easy to abused and was in fact abused often. Directly by people seeking or enjoying to be "toxic" (in loose meaning). All you have to do is to pretend little bit you are clueless again and again, despite being told again and again. And to shut up targets - "he/she does not mean that", "he/she is just insecure", "you know how he/she is". If you cant prove intent, you had no grounds to even talk about that that person is doing to you again and again.
  - Gareth321 5y ago
    I don't contend that. I'm arguing that the cost of the move to a perception based standard is far higher than the former. I'm arguing that it is, in effect, completely unenforceable, arbitrary, and destructive to not just individuals, but society as a whole. Free speech is not without cost, but it has been successfully utilised to everyone's benefit for hundreds of years. I can only surmise that those advocating for this have never read about or understood the importance of the Enlightenment. They don't understand the horror of living under a social regime where the powerful control language and effectively thought. They don't understand why the ability to risk offense is critical for democracy, science, and social progress. Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful.
    - 5y ago
Foobar8568 5y ago
And words with multiple meaning (and opposite meaning) depending of context or voice intonation.
throwaway48375 5y ago
haunter 5y ago
Faggots are also a food in the UK. It was a poor man's dish, using offals. Not so popopular anymore but you can still find it in some stores (and probably at local butchers in the Midlands and Wales) https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-mr-brains-6-pork-faggots-656g/5000187139529 https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-mr-brains-6-pork-faggot...
- skissane 5y ago
  HN marked this comment as dead. Looks like HN has some of the same problem we are talking about here Before I noticed this comment, I made one of my own, making the same point - and it seems HN has marked it as dead for much the same reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069899 ‘Tis ironic. (edit: thank you to whoever vouched my comment, it isn't dead any more)
  - vidarh 5y ago
    While there's a touch of irony, it the HN system of letting users see dead comments and vouch for them is also a good example of how this kind of filtering can be done in a far less brutal way than outright blocks. If we could trust these filters to only be used for relatively soft touch blocks like this, then false positives wouldn't be such an issue.
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
monkeybutton 5y ago
The same argument can be made for machine translation. For an algorithm to be able to successfully translate an entirely new idiom, expression or metaphor, it has to be aware of the real world and context it came from. Until there is some level of AGI that can observe and interpret the world on its own, translation and toxicity detection will be limited to examples included in training data.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Nonce. Means paedophile in the UK, apparently [0]. I was brought up in the UK and only discovered this recently (the bad way). So not even the whole of the UK, but only parts of it. Obviously also a technical term used all the time in its technical sense with no problem. Context and culture is way more important than the actual words used when trying to determine the meaning of a statement. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nonce https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nonce
- native_samples 5y ago
  Supposedly the term originates in a UK prison sign N.O.N.C.E. used around the turn of the century, meaning "not on normal courtyard exercise". "Obviously also a technical term used all the time in its technical sense with no problem." Or sometimes not ... a blog I'm involved with recently had a WordPress server problem which caused commenters to receive a message like "Illegal operation: bad nonce". The readers are non technical and mostly British. Some had to be calmed down a bit! Maybe it's an age thing? Everyone my age knows what nonce means but mostly because it was so amusingly satirized by Brass Eye in the late 90s at the height of a media induced paedophilia scare. Chris Morris got politicians and celebrities to say stupid stuff on camera by telling them it was for charity literally called Nonce Sense: "Did you know that a child under the influence of a paedophile may smell like hammers? That's right - I'm talking Nonce Sense" https://thesundae.net/2021/01/21/talking-nonce-sense-in-praise-of-paedogeddon/ https://thesundae.net/2021/01/21/talking-nonce-sense-in-prai... The program was a sensation at the time but probably only within a certain age group. I can't imagine that sort of satire would have appealed to older people.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    it could be age-related. Though I was in the UK in the late 90's and don't remember this at all. But then, I discovered the internet and stopped watching TV completely around then too.
    - YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
skissane 5y ago
> "Fag" in the UK is frequently used to refer to cigarettes. Another example: faggots are a traditional meatball dish from parts of England and Wales-the term has nothing to do with anyone’s sexuality. And yet, American social media companies have repeatedly blocked British users for posting about the dish. There is also a British pudding called “spotted dick” - in this context, “dick” is a dialectical term for “pudding”, no known connection with genitalia. A friend of my wife recently had her Facebook account restricted for making a post about cooking jerk chicken for dinner. Facebook claimed she was using “abusive language”
- OJFord 5y ago
  I'm not sure if it's an example (surely it's used in AmE too?) but in a spectacularly dumb one, I felt, Amazon recently discarded (completely! no possibility to edit it!) my lengthy & detailed & photograph-laden review, because I commented on the quality of the 'knob'.
  - gs17 5y ago
    Yes, in American English we have non-genital knobs as well. Very bizarre they would take down a review for that.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Didn't even accept it in the first place. I would have reworded it happily of course - but it really annoyed me and put me off ever bothering to review anything that it just completely destroyed it; I could start again from scratch but all my effort was wasted so just abandoned it at that point.
- xdennis 5y ago
  Apparently it's been renamed "spotted richard" in parliament[1]. [1]: https://news.sky.com/story/spotted-dick-renamed-spotted-richard-to-spare-blushes-in-parliament-11405421 https://news.sky.com/story/spotted-dick-renamed-spotted-rich...
pjc50 5y ago
Br.Eng. has had plenty of experience evolving under censorship, it's where our great tradition of innuendo comes from. I'm thinking particularly of Polari (Roma-influenced gay slang), and how Kenneth Williams got an entire comedy show packed with man-on-man innuendo to be broadcast regularly on national radio in the middle of the afternoon (Round the Horne). At a time when homosexuality was illegal. Or try explaining panto to Americans. Or even Allo Allo, a show which would .. definitely not be made nowadays. I've seen false positives referred to as the "Scunthorpe problem". Someone on the internet has a nice map of filthy-sounding real UK place names ...
- vintermann 5y ago
  Interesting! "Polare" is slang for buddy in Swedish. Maybe it is a Romani loanword?
- twic 5y ago
  > I've seen false positives referred to as the "Scunthorpe problem". Someone on the internet has a nice map of filthy-sounding real UK place names ... There's a reason Essex University had to register sx.ac.uk as an alternative domain name.
Lucasoato 5y ago
The absurdity is so high that to lower the amount of hate-speech Facebook started banning the word "hate" (and translations). This isn't documented anywhere, but I find it hilarious and dystopian that posts that contain the world "hate" in the description or in the comments get blocked more easily, or soft-banned (they don't show up in anyone's feed), even if the word is used in harmless contexts...
jgrahamc 5y ago
Now imagine being called my name. A John is a prostitute’s client and as for Cumming.
hnbad 5y ago
Let's be clear about this: the purpose of these models is to cut costs, not to accurately gauge what was said. Many business models based on user generated content wouldn't be possible if the businesses had to pay minimum wage to people for moderating that content. Using an AI model, no matter how broken, allows them to seem more concerned than if they were just relying on an old-school word filter without doing any actual due diligence.
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
capableweb 5y ago
> Has anyone realised yet that almost all of this folly? I suppose not when there is money to be made. Yes, of course everyone realizes that no filter actually works in practice. But they are not built to work, they are built to give the smallest impression of working. Tumblr doesn't need their site to be absolutely clear of nudity to attract investors, they only need to give the impression that it's absolutely clear of nudity and that they are trying to keep it so.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toss1 5y ago
Context, and the inability to actually have any understanding is the entire problem with what is called "AI" these days. Sure "AI" can do a lot of impressive first-level pattern matching, and that can be the basis of many useful outputs. But ANYTHING that requires actually understanding the context, whether it is existence of new obstacles for a 'self-driving' vehicle, understanding of actual meaning for a language model, or anything else, is a complete and utter failure. Despite appearances, while some of it is genuinely useful, we're really no further than fancy parlor tricks. Crack even the next level of contextual understanding, and it will be an astonishing leap.
zeruch 5y ago
That language aspect aside (it's difficult enough to wrap around), the abject and consistent failure around contextual cues is abysmal. Sarcasm, deflection and other aspects of talking patterns in relationships (e.g. I have a good friend and we consistently threaten each other with ever more Rube Goldbergian forms of cartoonish violence -such as offering to trebuchet them into a wall of shattered glass coated in guano- when one of us says something fleetingly dumb, as a running gag. FB has flagged this more than once, and it's dumb AF). Content management done well is expensive, and requires humans with superior grokking skills. No place cares enough to try.

vidarh 5y ago

> How are you going to train an AI to know the context that the person might be talking about bread instead of a woman? For starters, you can't unless you actually include the context in the training set. Then again, a lot of humans won't successfully manage that either...

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> For starters, you can't unless you actually include the context in the training set. It's worse than that. The context doesn't just have to be in the training set. It also has to be available on the other end, when you're using the model to make a determination. And it isn't. Which is why even human censors can't get it right. The parties communicating can, and almost always do, have external shared state that The Decider doesn't. Which gives the same words different meaning. Imagine hearing an inside joke you're on the outside of and then being asked to adjudicate whether it was offensive.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Sure, but you do have extra context you can make available on both ends, but that I'm assuming most don't even try to include. E.g. if judging tweets for example you'd presumably do a lot better if you evaluated the tweets in context of followers and in context of past tweets - both recent and the accounts history. E.g. an account that posts white supremacy tweets regularly is likely to mean something entirely different if RT'ing a BLM tweet with "that is fucking awesome" than what someone with #BLM in their profile is likely to mean. Part of the problem is that they're throwing away a huge amount of the state they do in fact have. But I absolutely agree it's in general an unsolvable issue - I pointed to a story from my childhood elsewhere showing how trivially people cause problems for "The Decider": A childhood friend being forced not to call his brother names and switching to using names of cheeses. Is "Edam" an insult or a food preference? You can't know without context. And it needs to be very local context, because humans very quickly pick up on when you just start using a word to mean something else, so it doesn't even need to be any shared external state about the word, just a shared understanding of where the receiver might expect an insult coupled with an unexpected response that will then easily get labelled an insult. That unexpected term might well in itself be positive if the receiver expects criticism. "Awesome" and "I love it!" are perfectly good insults when the other party has just told you something where the appropriate response would be negative, for example.
  - pph 5y ago
    That reminds me of Chinese online censorship / banning of words, which lead to people using homoglyphs or homophones.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > E.g. if judging tweets for example you'd presumably do a lot better if you evaluated the tweets in context of followers and in context of past tweets - both recent and the accounts history. Must never use followers. Or anything else the account holder has no control over. Otherwise you'll end up with the same kind of SEO problems where competitors and foreign governments create fake accounts to follow or interact with disfavored ones and destroy their algorithmic reputation. Guilt by association in general is malice. Someone who regularly interacts with white supremacists might be a white supremacist -- and maybe 90% of them are -- but it could also be someone criticizing, mocking or debunking them. And if it gets out that the algorithm is penalizing people for doing that, they'll stop. Which is very bad.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      Even using who an account follows incentivizes echo chambers, more than they already are. I specifically follow a few locals that I would often notice upset with the same politicians that I was, but for diametrically different reasons. Even though I disagree with them on most everything, I find value in having a few of those voices on my feed visibly attached to a consistent person. It helps me to resist seeing the "other side" as just an impersonal sea of voices.
echen 5y ago
> For starters, you can't unless you actually include the context in the training set. 100%. It's crazy how often context is missing from datasets! We wrote a separate blog post recently about this too: https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/why-context-aware-datasets-are-crucial-for-data-centric-ai https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/why-context-aware-datasets-are-c...

s3tz 5y ago

With companies like that, at the end of the day they only really answer to shareholders so every problem is a nail.

Gareth321 5y ago
So we hope that customers eventually stop using their services, hurting their bottom line. I've been following some drama in chat/user interaction in modern games. People are getting banned in Forza Horizon 5 for funny decals. One guy got an 8,000 year ban for a Kim Jong-un KFC paint job (https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article25686363.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_PAY-Kim-Jong-un-Forza1.jpg https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article25686363.ece...). EA is banning entire accounts - access to ALL games on an account - for swearing in Apex Legends. All of the major studios are in the process of severely restricting and even removing chat in their games. The latest Battlefield 2042 game doesn't even have voice chat, and they removed the global scoreboard altogether because they didn't want poorly performing players to know how poorly they were performing. The list goes on and on. To me, this is all a serious reduction in the enjoyment I have in games. I grew up playing Counter Strike, and s**-talking and competing was a big part of the experience. I just won't play games where I'm not allowed to interact with other players.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  The market will solve that. People will stop giving crazy companies money when their products become "not fun". See: Battlefield 2042 failing pretty hard. That being said: I specifically only buy entertainment products that do NOT require me to listen to some 14-year-old describing sexual activity with my female family members in great detail because his nonexistent skills make me keep winning. Different strokes for different blokes.
- aardvark179 5y ago
  The whole thing about shit talking in games was also the reason I never wanted to play most of them, and why games like Journey were so refreshing. At some point games companies were bound to notice the ways voice chat limited their market and remove it.

eecc 5y ago

That’s why you introduce USA-style puritan PoCo. there are enough trigger happy people with less understanding than an AI, all eager to kick enough rages to wear down a saint…

js8 5y ago

> Has anyone realised yet that almost all of this folly? This guy did: https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU Humans are inventing double-entendres to create the ambiguity.

mdoms 5y ago

I have been banned from a subreddit for using the word "cunt" in an affectionate way. We must not let Americans design these models.

Gareth321 5y ago

I couldn't agree more. I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. It seems that an absence of malintent in language is no longer sufficient defense. If one perceives the language as offensive, it is. This is an absurd standard because with a sufficient audience size, someone will find something offensive. This standard is a de facto end to all discussion. It only takes one hyper sensitive audience member (legitimate or troll) to shut down all discussion. This is not a sustainable strategy for society. It is of course impossible for algorithms to parse perceived intent by the lowest common denominator, and attempting to do so is nothing more than defensive legal posturing.

watwut 5y ago
Because "intent" rule was easy to abused and was in fact abused often. Directly by people seeking or enjoying to be "toxic" (in loose meaning). All you have to do is to pretend little bit you are clueless again and again, despite being told again and again. And to shut up targets - "he/she does not mean that", "he/she is just insecure", "you know how he/she is". If you cant prove intent, you had no grounds to even talk about that that person is doing to you again and again.
- Gareth321 5y ago
  I don't contend that. I'm arguing that the cost of the move to a perception based standard is far higher than the former. I'm arguing that it is, in effect, completely unenforceable, arbitrary, and destructive to not just individuals, but society as a whole. Free speech is not without cost, but it has been successfully utilised to everyone's benefit for hundreds of years. I can only surmise that those advocating for this have never read about or understood the importance of the Enlightenment. They don't understand the horror of living under a social regime where the powerful control language and effectively thought. They don't understand why the ability to risk offense is critical for democracy, science, and social progress. Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful.
  - 5y ago

Foobar8568 5y ago

And words with multiple meaning (and opposite meaning) depending of context or voice intonation.

throwaway48375 5y ago

haunter 5y ago

Faggots are also a food in the UK. It was a poor man's dish, using offals. Not so popopular anymore but you can still find it in some stores (and probably at local butchers in the Midlands and Wales) https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-mr-brains-6-pork-faggots-656g/5000187139529 https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-mr-brains-6-pork-faggot...

skissane 5y ago
HN marked this comment as dead. Looks like HN has some of the same problem we are talking about here Before I noticed this comment, I made one of my own, making the same point - and it seems HN has marked it as dead for much the same reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069899 ‘Tis ironic. (edit: thank you to whoever vouched my comment, it isn't dead any more)
- vidarh 5y ago
  While there's a touch of irony, it the HN system of letting users see dead comments and vouch for them is also a good example of how this kind of filtering can be done in a far less brutal way than outright blocks. If we could trust these filters to only be used for relatively soft touch blocks like this, then false positives wouldn't be such an issue.
YEwSdObPQT 5y ago

monkeybutton 5y ago

The same argument can be made for machine translation. For an algorithm to be able to successfully translate an entirely new idiom, expression or metaphor, it has to be aware of the real world and context it came from. Until there is some level of AGI that can observe and interpret the world on its own, translation and toxicity detection will be limited to examples included in training data.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

Nonce. Means paedophile in the UK, apparently [0]. I was brought up in the UK and only discovered this recently (the bad way). So not even the whole of the UK, but only parts of it. Obviously also a technical term used all the time in its technical sense with no problem. Context and culture is way more important than the actual words used when trying to determine the meaning of a statement. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nonce https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nonce

native_samples 5y ago
Supposedly the term originates in a UK prison sign N.O.N.C.E. used around the turn of the century, meaning "not on normal courtyard exercise". "Obviously also a technical term used all the time in its technical sense with no problem." Or sometimes not ... a blog I'm involved with recently had a WordPress server problem which caused commenters to receive a message like "Illegal operation: bad nonce". The readers are non technical and mostly British. Some had to be calmed down a bit! Maybe it's an age thing? Everyone my age knows what nonce means but mostly because it was so amusingly satirized by Brass Eye in the late 90s at the height of a media induced paedophilia scare. Chris Morris got politicians and celebrities to say stupid stuff on camera by telling them it was for charity literally called Nonce Sense: "Did you know that a child under the influence of a paedophile may smell like hammers? That's right - I'm talking Nonce Sense" https://thesundae.net/2021/01/21/talking-nonce-sense-in-praise-of-paedogeddon/ https://thesundae.net/2021/01/21/talking-nonce-sense-in-prai... The program was a sensation at the time but probably only within a certain age group. I can't imagine that sort of satire would have appealed to older people.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  it could be age-related. Though I was in the UK in the late 90's and don't remember this at all. But then, I discovered the internet and stopped watching TV completely around then too.
  - YEwSdObPQT 5y ago

skissane 5y ago

> "Fag" in the UK is frequently used to refer to cigarettes. Another example: faggots are a traditional meatball dish from parts of England and Wales-the term has nothing to do with anyone’s sexuality. And yet, American social media companies have repeatedly blocked British users for posting about the dish. There is also a British pudding called “spotted dick” - in this context, “dick” is a dialectical term for “pudding”, no known connection with genitalia. A friend of my wife recently had her Facebook account restricted for making a post about cooking jerk chicken for dinner. Facebook claimed she was using “abusive language”

OJFord 5y ago
I'm not sure if it's an example (surely it's used in AmE too?) but in a spectacularly dumb one, I felt, Amazon recently discarded (completely! no possibility to edit it!) my lengthy & detailed & photograph-laden review, because I commented on the quality of the 'knob'.
- gs17 5y ago
  Yes, in American English we have non-genital knobs as well. Very bizarre they would take down a review for that.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Didn't even accept it in the first place. I would have reworded it happily of course - but it really annoyed me and put me off ever bothering to review anything that it just completely destroyed it; I could start again from scratch but all my effort was wasted so just abandoned it at that point.
xdennis 5y ago
Apparently it's been renamed "spotted richard" in parliament[1]. [1]: https://news.sky.com/story/spotted-dick-renamed-spotted-richard-to-spare-blushes-in-parliament-11405421 https://news.sky.com/story/spotted-dick-renamed-spotted-rich...

pjc50 5y ago

Br.Eng. has had plenty of experience evolving under censorship, it's where our great tradition of innuendo comes from. I'm thinking particularly of Polari (Roma-influenced gay slang), and how Kenneth Williams got an entire comedy show packed with man-on-man innuendo to be broadcast regularly on national radio in the middle of the afternoon (Round the Horne). At a time when homosexuality was illegal. Or try explaining panto to Americans. Or even Allo Allo, a show which would .. definitely not be made nowadays. I've seen false positives referred to as the "Scunthorpe problem". Someone on the internet has a nice map of filthy-sounding real UK place names ...

vintermann 5y ago
Interesting! "Polare" is slang for buddy in Swedish. Maybe it is a Romani loanword?
twic 5y ago
> I've seen false positives referred to as the "Scunthorpe problem". Someone on the internet has a nice map of filthy-sounding real UK place names ... There's a reason Essex University had to register sx.ac.uk as an alternative domain name.

Lucasoato 5y ago

The absurdity is so high that to lower the amount of hate-speech Facebook started banning the word "hate" (and translations). This isn't documented anywhere, but I find it hilarious and dystopian that posts that contain the world "hate" in the description or in the comments get blocked more easily, or soft-banned (they don't show up in anyone's feed), even if the word is used in harmless contexts...

jgrahamc 5y ago

Now imagine being called my name. A John is a prostitute’s client and as for Cumming.

hnbad 5y ago

Let's be clear about this: the purpose of these models is to cut costs, not to accurately gauge what was said. Many business models based on user generated content wouldn't be possible if the businesses had to pay minimum wage to people for moderating that content. Using an AI model, no matter how broken, allows them to seem more concerned than if they were just relying on an old-school word filter without doing any actual due diligence.

YEwSdObPQT 5y ago

capableweb 5y ago

> Has anyone realised yet that almost all of this folly? I suppose not when there is money to be made. Yes, of course everyone realizes that no filter actually works in practice. But they are not built to work, they are built to give the smallest impression of working. Tumblr doesn't need their site to be absolutely clear of nudity to attract investors, they only need to give the impression that it's absolutely clear of nudity and that they are trying to keep it so.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

toss1 5y ago

Context, and the inability to actually have any understanding is the entire problem with what is called "AI" these days. Sure "AI" can do a lot of impressive first-level pattern matching, and that can be the basis of many useful outputs. But ANYTHING that requires actually understanding the context, whether it is existence of new obstacles for a 'self-driving' vehicle, understanding of actual meaning for a language model, or anything else, is a complete and utter failure. Despite appearances, while some of it is genuinely useful, we're really no further than fancy parlor tricks. Crack even the next level of contextual understanding, and it will be an astonishing leap.

zeruch 5y ago

That language aspect aside (it's difficult enough to wrap around), the abject and consistent failure around contextual cues is abysmal. Sarcasm, deflection and other aspects of talking patterns in relationships (e.g. I have a good friend and we consistently threaten each other with ever more Rube Goldbergian forms of cartoonish violence -such as offering to trebuchet them into a wall of shattered glass coated in guano- when one of us says something fleetingly dumb, as a running gag. FB has flagged this more than once, and it's dumb AF). Content management done well is expensive, and requires humans with superior grokking skills. No place cares enough to try.