Google's AI-Powered Tune Chrome Extension Hides Toxic Comments

Online is a big, bad world, and not everyone can be thick-skinned so as to overlook the trolls, negative comments or insults. To make your online life slightly stress-free, a Google Chrome extension called Tune is taking the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Developed by Alphabet's Jigsaw, Tune's Perspective AI learns to flag negative comments from thousands of people labelling millions of posts as spam, harassment or obscene content. Once a comment is identified as toxic, Tune can adjust the visibility of such comments.

According to a blog post on Jigsaw team, Tune automatically hides comments that its Perspective AI considers toxic. Tune works for comments on a variety of platforms, including Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Disqus.

The Tune users can choose from complete silence in ‘Zen Mode' to viewing everything without any filter. You can further choose to adjust the comments based on the site. For instance, you can choose to disable the tool for Facebook and enable it for Reddit.

The Jigsaw team notes that the Tune is still experimental and will miss some toxic comments and may hide some non-toxic ones. The team also says that it should not be treated as a solution of online toxicity or harassment. The team is just seeking to show how machine learning can be used to help people as they read online discussions.

“We hope that Tune can inspire platforms and developers to explore viewership controls for readers and enable communities to join discussions without relying solely on comment moderation,” wrote CJ Adams, Product Manager, Jigsaw, in the blog post.

Tune can be downloaded from Chrome Web Store.

Written with inputs from ANI