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