Google AI polices newspaper comments - BBC News

The New York Times is enabling comments on more of its online articles because of an artificial intelligence tool developed by Google. The software, named Perspective, helps identify "toxic" language, allowing the newspaper's human moderators to focus on non-offensive posts more quickly. Its algorithms have been trained by feeding them millions of posts previously vetted by the team. By contrast, several other news sites have shut their comments sections. Popular Science, Motherboard, Reuters, National Public Radio, Bloomberg and The Daily Beast are among those to have stopped allowing the public to post their thoughts on their sites, in part because of the cost and effort required to vet them for obscene and potentially libellous content. The BBC restricts comments to a select number of its stories for the same reasons, but as a result many of them end up being complaints about the selection.