Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
The UK-based company ASI Data Science unveiled a machine learning algorithm Wednesday that can identify terrorist propaganda videos with 99 percent accuracy.
This development marks one of the first instances of a company successfully using A.I. to flag extremist propaganda. The Islamic State group is notorious for its social media recruiting efforts, and this algorithm could help curtail them.
While the researchers at ASI wouldn't discuss any technical specifics of the algorithm, it appears to work like other kinds of A.I. recognition software. The algorithm can examine any video and determine the probability that the video is a piece of extremist propaganda. According to the BBC, the algorithm was trained on thousands of hours of terrorist recruiting videos, and it uses characteristics from these videos to assign probability scores.
Source: https://www.inverse.com/article/41273-uk-company-creates-algorithm-to-flag-propaganda
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Machine learning algorithms are now involved in the bulk of video removal from YouTube. ~80% of videos removed by YouTube in Q4 2017 were initially flagged by a computer, with many receiving less than 10 views before removal:
The vast majority of videos removed from YouTube toward the end of last year for violating the site's content guidelines had first been detected by machines instead of humans, the Google-owned company said on Monday. YouTube said it took down 8.28 million videos during the fourth quarter of 2017, and about 80 percent of those videos had initially been flagged by artificially intelligent computer systems.
The new data highlighted the significant role machines — not just users, government agencies and other organizations — are taking in policing the service as it faces increased scrutiny over the spread of conspiracy videos, fake news and violent content from extremist organizations. Those videos are sometimes promoted by YouTube's recommendation system and unknowingly financed by advertisers, whose ads are placed next to them through an automated system.
[...] Betting on improvements in artificial intelligence is a common Silicon Valley approach to dealing with problematic content; Facebook has also said it is counting on A.I. tools to detect fake accounts and fake news on its platform. But critics have warned against depending too heavily on computers to replace human judgment.
Also at Recode.
Previously:
Google Fails to Stop Major Brands From Pulling Ads From YouTube
AI Beating Mechanical Turks at YouTube Censorship Accuracy
Related:
YouTube Cracks Down on Weird Content Aimed at Kids
A.I. Algorithm Recognizes Terrorist Propaganda With 99% Accuracy
(Score: 5, Insightful) by physicsmajor on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:28AM (6 children)
It simply flags everything and/or cheats. In all liklihood they actually took a huge collection of random videos off YouTube or similar and compared it to known terrorist propaganda. So it's probably a great detector on 'desert' and 'arab dudes'; that won't work at all in the real world.
The fact that they won't discuss specifics nor actually define what 'accuracy' means in this context (Sensitivity? Specificity? AOC? Actual numbers for false positives/false negatives?) should set the warning klaxons blaring. Until they disclose at bare minimum testing methods and results, consider this a poor attempt to fleece angel investors.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
Yes. I have echoes of Theranos here. Prove your effectiveness in objective tests or switch to selling snake oil.
Separately, I'd love to feed a copy of Rambo into this to see what comes out.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday February 15 2018, @10:20AM
Unlike the alternative, I might be tempted to buy snake oil the price and specific energy are right.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:42AM
I hope the NSA network omnipresent-omnioppressive algorithms work that way too. It's important once in a while to say things like president, allahu akbar, bomb, cell, all words or phrases with innocent uses but which you'd think they would flag for study later. Killer technique against intelligence targets to sprinkle that stuff in online forums, etc. Stand with me, my brothers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:48AM (1 child)
Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was over. But George Bush, President Bush, was a very mixed up guy. He said that Saddam Hussein loved terrorists, that he helped terrorists. That was a lie, or a mistake. It wasn't a mistake to fight terrorism and fight it hard, and I guess maybe if I had to do it, I would have fought terrorism but not necessarily Iraq. It was a tremendous cost to this country. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism. You want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq. It’s like Harvard, OK? So sad.
George Bush, not the smartest guy. But he was smart enough to become President twice, he was elected twice to that. Overwhelmingly. Not many people can say that. So I think he's smarter than a lot of people. Has cyber ever been elected President? Or even, like, you know, Mayor? Obviously, I'm being sarcastic. Our cyber is improving very quickly, but it's not smart enough to get elected. George Bush got elected, he didn't know who was a terrorist and who wasn't. How is cyber going to know?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:06AM
More like the Wharton of terrorism.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday February 15 2018, @10:26AM
[1] When the training set and the testing set are the same.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:38AM (1 child)
> the algorithm was trained on thousands of hours of terrorist recruiting videos
And then it became really good at telling you which are extremist propaganda, e.g. any video where women don't wear Burqas, any video featuring music, any video showing Christians and Jews not get beheaded, as well as any video featuring any elected person.
In totally unrelated news, the personnel at ASI Data Science had to be evacuated from their building by SWAT teams, and internet access was cut off in the area.
One developer was allegedly heard muttering "what have we done?" as he was strapped into an ambulance, next to a second one who was screaming something about Launch Codes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:44AM
I remember an anecdote wherein an AI got really, really good at identifying pictures of tanks (military track-driven vehicles). Until later they noted that it was really mostly just discerning whether the pictures had been taken in cloudy or sunny conditions, which aligned with their test image set pretty well.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:53AM (7 children)
Please stop with this. If 1 in 100 videos are target, then always guess non-target. Now you have 99% accuracy.
This is a totally meaningless measure of performance. No news article, press release, or (especially) scientific/technical article should be using it. Ignore all submissions to this site that do so.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Thursday February 15 2018, @03:02AM (4 children)
quite. "Never believe a number unless you know the variance and distribution from which it is drawn".
This makes many articles unreadable, speculative, dribble.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 15 2018, @03:12AM (3 children)
Many articles? What percent of them?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Thursday February 15 2018, @03:43AM (2 children)
pretty much everything not peer reviewed (99/100) :-)
And fair number of things that *are* peer reviewed!
During my PhD, they made us try and reproduce the graphs of published articles in Nature/Science....so if they are the most prominent, you can imagine the rest...
Study panels for the NSF and NIH can be even worse - critical thinking is greatly affected by funding opportunities!
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday February 15 2018, @10:31AM (1 child)
I would love to see school mathematics curricula replace a load of the calculus that they teach with more stats. Calculus is very useful in a few fields, but even there most of what you're doing is constructing a differential equation that models something and then asking a machine to solve it, so practicing solving them until you're reasonably fast for a human, but still orders of magnitude slower than a computer, is not very useful. In contrast, statistics is useful in every experimental subject, including physical and social sciences.
Most of the papers that I review are related to compilers and even at the top conferences it's still common for people to run a benchmark n times, sometimes discard outliers (but not explain why) and take the mean of the 'before' and 'after' versions and then say 'we have an X% speedup!'. Often X is less than the performance variation that you get by randomising the layout of functions in a binary. It's exceedingly unusual to see anyone talking about the distribution, any kind of confidence interval, or what their experimental error was.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Thursday February 15 2018, @11:45AM
*all* mathematics is better than intuition. Learning how to apply known methods is a key way to investigate the world around us.
"soft" subjects like sociology, psychology and economics, get disproportionate political weight specifically because the mathematical treatment is so weak, and the general public is generally innumerate.
We use differential equations to find possible solutions for given systems. We use statistics to evaluate the quality. The two are not separable, part of the same toolbox.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:09AM (1 child)
Since they don't give a false positive rate, or define what 99% accuracy means, I am going to declare that MY AI can detect terrorists with 100% accuracy.
Unfortunately, the false positive rate is rather high, since the algorithm is to mark every video input as terrorist activity.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:17AM
Best way to spot bullshit is when they provide the sensitivity without giving the specificity as well. Bonus points if there is no detail as to the sample size used to get the sensitivity figure.
(Score: 4, Funny) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:54AM (7 children)
If there is one thing today's Terrorist Propaganda suffers from, it's lack of subtlety, and of course, poor quality, bad composition, can't hold a steady shot, too much lead in, sometimes cutting out before the climax, wind noise(!), just all sorts of things. With all this 4K stuff out now, I expect better work from these people. And speak English, okay? Put a little effort into the script.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:05AM (1 child)
They obviously try to make it big by imitating the most watched type of video on the internet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SpockLogic on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:10PM
I'll be impressed when they identify this YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/NRAVideos/ [youtube.com] as dangerous propaganda. They are responsible for the death of thousands of Americans annually, another 17 in Florida yesterday.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:30AM (2 children)
At first I thought you were talking about YouTube "stars."
If there is a book on how to become huge on YouTube, it will have to cover topics like...
Given the popularity of YouTube "stars," Today's terroristic propaganda agent is entering a market with a bar set very, very low.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:36AM (1 child)
Given the popularity of YouTube "stars," Today's terroristic propaganda agent is entering a market with a bar set very, very low.
Yes, and I do blame youtube for that. They focus too much on content, and not the quality of that content. They should ban poor work, not poor taste.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 15 2018, @03:15AM
And you would think that people in general would say "Maybe I can't say what makes a bad video, but I know one when I see one."
I really thought this would be a force, millions of people who perhaps had never held a video camera (other than their cell phone*), but who had seen enough well-made television and movies to be able to tell quality from crap, predominantly choosing quality, even if they couldn't say exactly why.
I was very, very wrong. Maybe it's an age-culture thing.
--------------------------
* Possibly the problem
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)
It's so hard to do multiple takes -- when you yell cut they do and once the head comes off there is just no gluing it back on a again just like with Humpty Dumpty.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 15 2018, @03:25PM
Yeah, but they can review the take before they do the next guy. And allah help the cameraman who repeats his mistakes!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:17AM (2 children)
* For certain definitions of "recognize"
** For certain definitions of "terrorist"
*** For certain definitions of "propaganda"
Your mileage may vary.
Professional driver on closed course.
Prices slightly higher in Canada.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:27AM (1 child)
Canada? You sound like a terrorist. Have you smuggled any maple syrup lately?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by melikamp on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:42AM
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:26AM (2 children)
The only way to be sure it works is to input the links to the IMF videos and see it correctly flagging them as terrorist propaganda.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:57AM (1 child)
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close, yet the ultimate test would consist of united states army, marines, and navy commercials. these are propaganda videos for the world's most powerful, wide-spread, damaging, and brazen terrorist force. and we can only hope this filter would also sweep up every political ad for a candidate who is ok with past, ongoing, and brand-new armed conflicts conducted in a stark violation of the international law. ~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:27AM
You forget, you can only be a terrorist if you lose.
So yes, any pathetic little group is always terrorists, no matter what they do. ISIS are clearly extremists whackoes bent on terrorism, but there are others, better examples. For example, Cuba has been listed as a state sponsor of terrorism for a long time, yet it's the US that's preventing real terrorists from going to jail. Cuba requested extradition numerous times. For decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_de_Aviaci%C3%B3n_Flight_455#FBI_and_CIA_knowledge [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:16AM (4 children)
What gave them away? Was it all the talk about the infidels? The decapitated heads? The chanting of Death to America? or the constant references to Allah?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 15 2018, @09:39AM (3 children)
Maybe just that they looked Arabic. For all we know, all of the material in the test set that was not terrorist propaganda may have shown people of western origin, and maybe also blacks for racial diversity. Arabs of course are neither.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:34PM (2 children)
From what I have seen of terrorist propaganda and recruitment videos they tend to not show their actual faces, balaclava and sunglasses etc seems to be the norm. I guess they could have a few different sets -- if they talk a lot about Allah and infidels and all the virgins you get to have sex with then they are muslim terrorists, if they talk about killing whitey and crackers they are some kind of black supremacists, if they talk about black helicopters and how the government wants to take the guns away and how ZOG controls us all then I guess they are white supremacists. If they talk a lot of about potatoes, protestants and the Queen then the IRA has risen and split again for the umpteenth time to the really really REAL IRA (I might have missed one or two really there ... it's hard to keep track).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:30PM (1 child)
And what if they talk about how Allah comes in a black helicopter to take the guns away from the Queen because he needs them to kill the infidel whitey, while the protestant ZOG controls all the virgins who want to have sex with potato crackers? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Touché) by ewk on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:43PM
Then praise Brian, because Monty Python has reunited :-D
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @12:02PM
... what terrorist propaganda looks like.
But I know it when I see it.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday February 16 2018, @01:15AM
So, have they tried running Army, Navy, Air Force recruiting commercials, and White House press briefings through it yet?
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."