Artificial Intelligence is Too Dumb to Fully Police Online Extremism, Experts Say
Artificial intelligence tools aren’t yet smart enough to root out all the extremist content posted on social media sites, despite tech executives’ claims to the contrary, experts told lawmakers on Tuesday.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have spent years building algorithms to weed out posts promoting terrorism and other radical causes, but today’s tech is unable to grapple with the complexities of human communication, witnesses said before a House Homeland Security Committee subpanel. As a result, tools often misidentify extremist posts as legitimate content or vice versa.
“The world’s best machine-learning resembles a crowd of millions of preschoolers—there are certainly problems … which a humongous group of children can be taught to solve,” said Alex Stamos, the program director at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory and Facebook’s former chief security officer.
