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Chinese researchers say they’ve developed an AI text censor that is 91 per cent accurate
- They claim it could be useful to ‘identify and filter sensitive information from online news media’
- China’s internet is tightly controlled and the government relies on a huge army of censors to vet content
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A research team in China claims to have developed a text censor that can filter “harmful information” on the internet with unprecedented accuracy using artificial intelligence.
Traditional machine censors rely mainly on keywords to do this and struggle to achieve 70 per cent accuracy, while AI technology – which needs to be trained by humans – has taken that to about 80 per cent in recent years.
The team from Shenyang Ligong University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences say their AI technology does not need to be trained by humans and “outperforms other approaches” to achieve more than 91 per cent accuracy.
It would be particularly useful to “identify and filter sensitive information from online news media”, lead researcher Li Shu and her colleagues wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Chinese Computer Systems on Monday.
China has more than 900 million internet users, more than any other country, and is building the world’s largest 5G networks to boost communication speed. But the internet is tightly controlled, with many sites blocked including Google, Facebook, Twitter and some foreign news outlets – and much of the content on the sites that are available is banned.
Prohibited topics are wide-ranging – from pornography to cults, drug abuse, firearm use, terrorism and attacks on the Communist Party and its top leaders.
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