4 ms·

> Sarcasm, cultural context and subtle forms of hate speech often slip through the cracks of even the most sophisticated algorithms. I don't know how this prob

> Sarcasm, cultural context and subtle forms of hate speech often slip through the cracks of even the most sophisticated algorithms. I don't know how this problem can be solved automatically without something that looks a lot like AGI and can monitor the whole internet to learn the evolving cultural context. AI moderation feels like self driving cars all over again: the happy path of detecting and censoring a dick pic - or self driving in perfect California weather - is relatively easy but automating the last 20% or so of content seems impossibly out of reach. The "subtle forms of hate speech" is especially hard and nebulous, as dog whistles in niche communities change adversarialy to get past moderation. In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. Then each instance of these AGIs would have to be run in and tailored to local jurisdictions and cultures because that is its own can of worms. I just don't see tech replacing humans in this unfortunate role, only augmenting their abilities. > The glossy veneer of the tech industry conceals a raw, human reality that spans the globe. From the outskirts of Nairobi to the crowded apartments of Manila, from Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon to the immigrant communities in Germany and the call centers of Casablanca, a vast network of unseen workers power our digital world. This part never really changed. Mechanical turk is almost 20 years old at this point and call center outsourcing is hardly new. What's new is just how much human-generated garbage we force them to sift through on our behalf. I wish there was a way to force these training data and moderation companies to provide proper mental health care .

datadrivenangel 2y ago
There's also the issue of things that are true and mean/hateful. If my GP says that I'm overweight, which is associated with negative health outcomes, that's factual. If someone on twitter calls me a fatso, that's mean/hateful.
drivebyhooting 2y ago
What is a dog whistle? Is it just an opinion people disagree with and so rather than engage with it they assume malice or ill intent? I really don’t get it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kevingadd 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) To simplify, dog whistles make a sound that's too high pitched for most humans to hear, but only dogs can hear it. So it's speech that the speaker's ingroup recognizes as meaning something other than what the literal interpretation would mean. It's coded speech, usually for racist, sexist or even violent purposes. An adjacent concept is giving orders without giving orders, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  Yes I too can google. And in fact I did. Evidently questioning the validity of dog whistle is a dog whistle itself. Meanwhile a small consolation is that https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/ agrees with me. So I’m in decent company.
  - Lerc 2y ago
    Ever watch the West Wing? The first episode should do it. One of the signs of dog whistle use is the situations in which the term is used that raises probability beyond the credible level of coincidence.
    - drivebyhooting 2y ago
      I don’t watch TV. To my mind, this dog whistle moniker is more of a tool for suppressing dissenting views than identifying covert bigotry. Apparently all the critical thinking has already been done off stage and now only those whom we agree with are tolerated. The others are shunned as racists or worse.
      - neaden 2y ago
whiplash451 2y ago
The difference between adult material detection and self driving is that the former is fundamentally adversarial. Humans will spend a lot of energy to hide porn content on the internet while self-driving might benefit from a virtuous circle: once enough waymos are out there, people will adapt and learn to drive/bike/walk alongside them. We have a fundamentally good reason to cooperate. I am not a self-driving fanatic but I do believe that a lot of edge cases might go away as we adapt to them.
- nradov 2y ago
  Animals, small children, and random objects dropped on the road will never "adapt" to self-driving. Good enough solutions will eventually be found for those scenarios but it's exactly those millions of different edge cases which make the problem so hard. A step ladder that falls off a work truck (like I saw on the freeway yesterday) isn't exactly "adversarial" but it will sure ruin your car if you run over it.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Animals, small children, and random objects dropped on the road don't adapt to human driving either; they aren't generally considered the core concern space (in the sense that if it is physically possible for a self-driving car to do better than a human in those contexts, it will, but the project isn't designed around doing better than a human in such corner cases. Doing worse than a human is not acceptable).
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. IMO there is the even more important point that beyond being a "judgement call", humans are far from being in agreement with what the "right answer" is here - it is inherently an impossible problem to solve, especially at the edge cases. Just look at the current debate in the US. There are tons of people screeching from the right that large online social networks and platforms censor conservative views, and similarly there are tons of people screeching from the left about misinformation and hate speech. In many cases they are talking about the exact same instances. It is quite literally a no-win situation.
hcurtiss 2y ago
I think there's a genuine conversation to be had about whether there even is such a thing as "hate speech." There's certainly "offensive speech," but if that's what we're going to try to eliminate, then it seems we'll have a bad time as the offense is definitionally subjective.
- yifanl 2y ago
  Is the claim there some special property that makes it impossible to convey hate as opposed any other type of idea through text? That seems extremely wrong, especially in this context, given that LLMs make no attempt to formalize "ideas", they're only interested in syntax.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    Maybe the name for the "hate speech" is poorly chosen, since it's not necessarily about "hate".
    - yifanl 2y ago
      I mean, what's the claim then, there's no such thing as an illegal idea? You can't assign a semantic value to a legal system.
- szundi 2y ago
  There is hate speech, like when someone tells poeple how other people are not human and must be eliminated. Happened a lot, happening now in wars you read about.
  - epicureanideal 2y ago
    But when "hate speech" becomes censorable and a crime, then people are incentivized to interpret as broadly as possible their opponents' statements and claim they should be interpreted as dehumanizing or encouraging violence. This can be done from both sides. Examples: Not sufficiently (for whoever) enforcing immigration laws? "Trying to eliminate the majority population, gradual ethnic cleansing". Talking about deporting illegal immigrants? "The first step on the road to murdering people they don't want in the country." And if the local judiciary or law enforcement is aligned with the interests of one side or the other, they can stretch the anti hate speech laws to use the legal system against their opponents.
tomjen3 2y ago
By definition a dogwhistle appears to not mean anything specific to anyone but the target group. So even human moderators can't moderate it.
HPsquared 2y ago
This adversarial thing could be called the "two words problem"... After that woman who was arrested in Russia by human moderators for holding a sign that said "two words" (an indirect reference to the phrase "no war").
ben_w 2y ago
I get the point, and agree that the opponents are in an adversarial relationship with the AI, but LLMs are already an AI that "can monitor the whole internet to learn the evolving cultural context". Consider for example that ChatGPT wasn't specifically designed to be good at programming Commodore 64 basic, which is a niche within a niche, but it can do that fine even when instructed in Welsh*, and if it can do that then surely it can spot these things too? > In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. I agree; while they know a lot, they know it poorly, and make decisions unwisely. > I wish there was a way to force these training data and moderation companies to provide proper mental health care . Good news, there is. An old flame used to work in a call center, ended up unionising the place. Bad news (from the POV of many here): she's literally a communist — and that's not a metaphor for "Democrats", she thinks the Dems are evil neoliberals. * I've not actually tried running this, because on a related note, can anyone recommend an emulator that will let me paste in text as if I was typing the content of the pasteboard on the keyboard? https://chatgpt.com/share/6717ff4e-db08-8011-8f2c-a33fa9653a03 https://chatgpt.com/share/6717ff4e-db08-8011-8f2c-a33fa9653a...

datadrivenangel 2y ago

There's also the issue of things that are true and mean/hateful. If my GP says that I'm overweight, which is associated with negative health outcomes, that's factual. If someone on twitter calls me a fatso, that's mean/hateful.

drivebyhooting 2y ago

What is a dog whistle? Is it just an opinion people disagree with and so rather than engage with it they assume malice or ill intent? I really don’t get it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kevingadd 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) To simplify, dog whistles make a sound that's too high pitched for most humans to hear, but only dogs can hear it. So it's speech that the speaker's ingroup recognizes as meaning something other than what the literal interpretation would mean. It's coded speech, usually for racist, sexist or even violent purposes. An adjacent concept is giving orders without giving orders, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
drivebyhooting 2y ago
Yes I too can google. And in fact I did. Evidently questioning the validity of dog whistle is a dog whistle itself. Meanwhile a small consolation is that https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/ agrees with me. So I’m in decent company.
- Lerc 2y ago
  Ever watch the West Wing? The first episode should do it. One of the signs of dog whistle use is the situations in which the term is used that raises probability beyond the credible level of coincidence.
  - drivebyhooting 2y ago
    I don’t watch TV. To my mind, this dog whistle moniker is more of a tool for suppressing dissenting views than identifying covert bigotry. Apparently all the critical thinking has already been done off stage and now only those whom we agree with are tolerated. The others are shunned as racists or worse.
    - neaden 2y ago

whiplash451 2y ago

The difference between adult material detection and self driving is that the former is fundamentally adversarial. Humans will spend a lot of energy to hide porn content on the internet while self-driving might benefit from a virtuous circle: once enough waymos are out there, people will adapt and learn to drive/bike/walk alongside them. We have a fundamentally good reason to cooperate. I am not a self-driving fanatic but I do believe that a lot of edge cases might go away as we adapt to them.

nradov 2y ago
Animals, small children, and random objects dropped on the road will never "adapt" to self-driving. Good enough solutions will eventually be found for those scenarios but it's exactly those millions of different edge cases which make the problem so hard. A step ladder that falls off a work truck (like I saw on the freeway yesterday) isn't exactly "adversarial" but it will sure ruin your car if you run over it.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Animals, small children, and random objects dropped on the road don't adapt to human driving either; they aren't generally considered the core concern space (in the sense that if it is physically possible for a self-driving car to do better than a human in those contexts, it will, but the project isn't designed around doing better than a human in such corner cases. Doing worse than a human is not acceptable).

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

> In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. IMO there is the even more important point that beyond being a "judgement call", humans are far from being in agreement with what the "right answer" is here - it is inherently an impossible problem to solve, especially at the edge cases. Just look at the current debate in the US. There are tons of people screeching from the right that large online social networks and platforms censor conservative views, and similarly there are tons of people screeching from the left about misinformation and hate speech. In many cases they are talking about the exact same instances. It is quite literally a no-win situation.

hcurtiss 2y ago

I think there's a genuine conversation to be had about whether there even is such a thing as "hate speech." There's certainly "offensive speech," but if that's what we're going to try to eliminate, then it seems we'll have a bad time as the offense is definitionally subjective.

yifanl 2y ago
Is the claim there some special property that makes it impossible to convey hate as opposed any other type of idea through text? That seems extremely wrong, especially in this context, given that LLMs make no attempt to formalize "ideas", they're only interested in syntax.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  Maybe the name for the "hate speech" is poorly chosen, since it's not necessarily about "hate".
  - yifanl 2y ago
    I mean, what's the claim then, there's no such thing as an illegal idea? You can't assign a semantic value to a legal system.
szundi 2y ago
There is hate speech, like when someone tells poeple how other people are not human and must be eliminated. Happened a lot, happening now in wars you read about.
- epicureanideal 2y ago
  But when "hate speech" becomes censorable and a crime, then people are incentivized to interpret as broadly as possible their opponents' statements and claim they should be interpreted as dehumanizing or encouraging violence. This can be done from both sides. Examples: Not sufficiently (for whoever) enforcing immigration laws? "Trying to eliminate the majority population, gradual ethnic cleansing". Talking about deporting illegal immigrants? "The first step on the road to murdering people they don't want in the country." And if the local judiciary or law enforcement is aligned with the interests of one side or the other, they can stretch the anti hate speech laws to use the legal system against their opponents.

tomjen3 2y ago

By definition a dogwhistle appears to not mean anything specific to anyone but the target group. So even human moderators can't moderate it.

HPsquared 2y ago

This adversarial thing could be called the "two words problem"... After that woman who was arrested in Russia by human moderators for holding a sign that said "two words" (an indirect reference to the phrase "no war").

ben_w 2y ago

I get the point, and agree that the opponents are in an adversarial relationship with the AI, but LLMs are already an AI that "can monitor the whole internet to learn the evolving cultural context". Consider for example that ChatGPT wasn't specifically designed to be good at programming Commodore 64 basic, which is a niche within a niche, but it can do that fine even when instructed in Welsh*, and if it can do that then surely it can spot these things too? > In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. I agree; while they know a lot, they know it poorly, and make decisions unwisely. > I wish there was a way to force these training data and moderation companies to provide proper mental health care . Good news, there is. An old flame used to work in a call center, ended up unionising the place. Bad news (from the POV of many here): she's literally a communist — and that's not a metaphor for "Democrats", she thinks the Dems are evil neoliberals. * I've not actually tried running this, because on a related note, can anyone recommend an emulator that will let me paste in text as if I was typing the content of the pasteboard on the keyboard? https://chatgpt.com/share/6717ff4e-db08-8011-8f2c-a33fa9653a03 https://chatgpt.com/share/6717ff4e-db08-8011-8f2c-a33fa9653a...