Artificial intelligence won't save the internet from porn

But unfettered access to all things smutty, dirty and questionably filthy has created a surge in censorship tools that, in theory, use algorithms and advanced artificial intelligence programs to identify porn and weed it out. Last year, Twitter acquired Madbits, a small AI startup that, according to a Wired report, created a program that accurately identifies NSFW content 99 percent of time and alerts users to its presence. Late last month, Yahoo open-sourced its own deep learning AI porn filter and there are no doubt similar projects underway at other internet companies. Big players have been sinking big money into cleaning up the internet for decades. The trouble is, censorship is a slippery slope, and obscenity is inherently subjective.