Teaching Artificial Intelligence to Zap Hate Speech
Teaching Artificial Intelligence to Zap Hate Speech
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2026/05/29/Teaching-Artificial-Intelligence-Zap-Hate-Speech/
Publish Date: 2026-05-29 18:53:00
Source Domain: thetyee.ca
How can spaces where people gather on the internet be safeguarded from trolls poisoning them with hate speech? Liam Hebert wondered if artificial intelligence could be trained to do the job.
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So, he dived deep into the complex world of teaching machines to grasp what people truly intend when, in conversation, they use certain words that can have different meanings in different group contexts. After all, some words that can be used as a vicious insult in some settings can be harmless in another.
Hebert tackled the challenge as he pursued a PhD in computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario — and produced a hate-speech zapping deep learning model so effective that when he was done, Google hired him as a research scientist. Hebert has also received prestigious awards including the IEEE Canadian Foundation, the Nick Cercone Graduate Scholarship in Computer Science award and a Vanier scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
We are two secondary school students who participated in a UBC research project that invited us to note our worries about the future and interview someone working to make things better. Racist and sexist speech online is something each of us encounter often, so we wanted to know if a technological fix might be invented. That led us to reach out to Hebert and talk to him about his project and why he pursued it.
Along the way, we also spoke with Takara Small, a Toronto-based journalist who covers technology and its social impacts for news outlets including the CBC and BBC. She reminds…
