“We have more information and more articles than any other time in history, and yet the toxicity of the conversations<br />that follow those articles are driving people away from the conversation,” said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas.<br />Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Alphabet, says it has developed a new tool for web<br />publishers to identify toxic comments that can undermine a civil exchange of ideas.<br />Now, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, says it plans to apply machine learning technology to promote more civil discourse on the internet<br />and make comment sections on sites a little less awful.<br />SAN FRANCISCO — From self-driving cars to multi-language translation, machine learning is underpinning<br />many of the technology industry’s biggest advances with its form of artificial intelligence.<br />It takes in training data — essentially, example after example — until it is familiar enough<br />to anticipate with a high degree of confidence the proper response for a given situation.<br />In this instance, Jigsaw had a team review hundreds of thousands of comments to<br />identify the types of comments that might deter people from a conversation.
