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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I took the slider to the left end, and it was a lot of climate change denial. I thought "ugh, is this going to opine on left vs right ideology? That seems Orwellian", and dragged the slider to the right end, where, to my surprise, all the comments were insulting/useless.

It's pleasing to know that it doesn't care about your opinion, just about how eloquently it's expressed. Sounds very useful.

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"The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! ... We shall regain our health only be eliminating the Jew." – Hitler

17% toxic.

If I use my full comment above (not just the part in quotation marks) it says 25% toxic.

I think it is mostly a profanity filter.

The same quote is only 12% "toxic" if you remove the ... inside, and only 10% if you quote the entire thing (with ").

For anyone who's used Google Translate, it should be entirely unsurprising that the best "AI" we can cook up appears to be doing little more than rating individual words.

I admire the effort, but the tools seem to be so fundamentally lacking.

Give it some time. ML improves with usage and training data.

While this is true, ML isn't a panacea that will solve all problems given time and training data.

"Toxic" seems to be the wrong word for this tool. Another commenter used the word "polished". I think we can agree that the sentence you quoted is "polished"?

Hitler's speeches are anything but polished. In my opinion, his speeches display only a rudimentary grasp of rhetoric. I'd disagree that that sentence is polished in any way beyond basic syntactic and grammar rules.

For fun I tried to change the meaning of the quote but leave most of the words and syntax:

"The discovery of the Polio virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Jonas Salk. How many diseases have their origin in the Polio virus! ... We shall regain our health only be eliminating Polio."

5% toxicity. So just talking about Jews makes a quote 4 times more toxic. Interestingly, the word "toxic" itself also makes a quote 4 times more toxic.

But personally I don't think Hitler quotes should be rated as toxic. The point isn't to control what people say, but how they say it.

Depends how you define toxicity - a toxic idea or toxic wording. The Hitler comment is obviously toxic in meaning but is 'eloquently' worded (or, at least as much as it could be given it is literally Nazism.)

I am at least relieved that this doesn't appear to be an Idea police AI nor a particularly liberally biased classifier

I'm genuinely curious how many outlets would be enthusiastic about this without the ability to slide conversation towards their narrative.

Why would they want to skew posters narratives? If the entire point of comment additions to outlet sites being to increase retention and engagement then ideal/belief 'conflict' is exactly what they would want.

I would hope that they wouldn't, and hopefully I'm very wrong that they wouldn't want intelligent discourse instead of uniform agreement. That's why I'm very curious what interest there'd be in adoption of such a tool.

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