Artificial intelligence is at the heart of online toxicity, Grand Committee hears

Artificial intelligence is playing a major role in exacerbating the problems being blamed on large digital platforms such as a Facebook Inc. and Google LLC, according to a U.S. expert who testified before the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy meeting in Ottawa this week. Ben Scott, a Stanford fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society and a former advisor to Hillary Clinton, said that it wasn't until the tech giants got hooked on machine learning that concerns about their polarizing effect and impact on democracy really took off. "It's not just the ads that get targeted. The entire communications environment in which we live is now tailored by machine intelligence to hold our attention," he said. "The more time people spend on the platform, the more ads they see and the more money they make. It's a beautiful business model, and it works."