This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiato.

Social media platforms like Facebook use a combination of artificial intelligence and human

moderators to scout out and eliminate hate speech.

But now researchers have developed a new AI tool that wouldn't just scrub hate speech, but it would

actually craft responses to it, like this.

The language used as highly offensive.

All ethnicities and social groups deserve tolerance.

And this type of intervention response can hopefully short-circus the hate cycles that we often get in these different

forums. Anna Bethky, a data scientist at Intel. The idea she says is to fight

hate speech with more speech, an approach advocated by the ACLU and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

So with her colleagues at UC Santa Barbara, Bethkey got access to more than 5,000

conversations from the site, Reddit, and nearly 12,000 more from Gab, a social media

site where many users banned by Twitter tend to resurface. The researchers

had real people craft sample responses to the hate speech in those

Reddit and Gab conversations, then they let natural language

processing algorithms learn from the real human responses and craft

their own such as I don't think using words that are sexist in nature

contribute to a productive conversation.

Which sounds pretty good,

but the machines also spit out slightly

head scratching responses like this one.

...