Google's troll-destroying AI can't cope with typos

Google's Perspective API, created in conjunction with Alphabet incubee Jigsaw, is supposed to provide an automated way to detect "toxic" language in social media. "Through different experiments, we show that an adversary can deceive the system by misspelling the abusive words or by adding punctuations between the letters," the four academics wrote in their recently published paper, "Deceiving Google's Perspective API Built for Detecting Toxic Comments." The API is intended to allow digital publishers to assess the sentiment expressed in online posts in real time. Words get sent to a server for analysis and scores get returned, ideally allowing publishers to detect trolls as they type and to take the necessary steps to keep online interaction civil. In practice, just like other automated content filtering, malware detection, and spam detection systems, Perspective can be fooled.