YouTube AI is putting explicit language into captions for videos aimed at children

An artificial intelligence algorithm used by YouTube to automatically add captions to clips, has been accidentally inserting explicit language into children's videos. The system, known as ASR (Automatic Speech Transcription), was found displaying words like corn as porn, beach as bitch and brave as rape, as reported by Wired. To better track the problem, a team from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, along with others, sampled 7,000 videos from 24 top-tier children's channels. Out of the videos they sampled, 40 per cent had'inappropriate' words in the captions, and one per cent had highly inappropriate words. They looked at children's videos on the main version of YouTube, rather than the YouTube Kids platform, which doesn't use automatically transcribed captions, as research revealed many parents still put children in front of the main version.