And while algorithms can catch problematic content, they can promote it, too, because they've been designed to boost user engagement and respond to how people react. The systems could be used to amplify scams, fuel harassment campaigns or spit out long pieces of text, such as fake news stories, that would appear to have been written by a human hand. They could also be abused for censorship: A university research team in China, where the government bans anything it deems "subversive" speech, said in April that its text-censoring AI could filter out "sensitive information from online news media" with more than 90 percent accuracy.