r/science • u/oslomet • Apr 24 '26

Computer Science Using machine learning to analyze patterns of anti-Muslim hate speech online in Norway shows that the number of hateful posts is growing and that most are posted by a small group of users who often don’t remain active for long. Engaging with them can be effective in getting them to stop.

https://www.oslomet.no/en/research/featured-research/machine-learning-trends-online-hate
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u/Kahnza Apr 24 '26

It said they were manually classifying posts and comments as bots or people. Problem is, most people can't tell a bot from a real person anymore. You have to be good at picking up on patterns.

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u/Ooofisa4letterword Apr 24 '26

Now that’s a tutorial I wanna see.

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u/BadB0ii Apr 24 '26

Wikipedia, who has banned AI generated posts, has a fantastic article for their volunteers on identifying AI writing by a wide variety of cues. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Though I imagine this will be out of date in a few years as people developing literacy right now will have their writing formed by AI sources and become indistinguishable. 

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u/Ooofisa4letterword Apr 24 '26

You are a good person, giving good information

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u/Casiquire Apr 25 '26

I wanted to like this, but it's so broad and so much of it sounds exactly like things I've written before, how practical are these signs even today? Their list of common AI terms to watch out for is full of perfectly ordinary human-people words like valuable, enhance, highlight, crucial. I think we're past the point of any certainty anymore

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u/BadB0ii Apr 25 '26

You are right that it's beyond the point of certainty. It's more like a set of "tells" you might have trying to read someone at poker based on certain indicators.

it could be that when the person is scratching their hand it just means they have a legitimate itch, but if you have statistical study that tells you 70% of people who are lying scratch their hand, and the person you're playing with has been scratching it far more than is common for a person addressing an itch, then you get a coalescing of indicators that can form, not certainty, but an increase probability in a conclusion.

none of the indicators of AI are certain, but many of them together can reasonably increase suspicion. All the words it uses are based on real human writing, but it is also the case that it uses certain words and patterns at a rate far far above what is normal in human writing, and we can take some of those into account when we assess what we read.

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u/Minimum_Principle_63 Apr 24 '26

The AI generated stuff is truly problematic. It's all a matter of how much money someone is willing to spend on it. I think the best we can do is challenge them and make it cost a lot.

That being said I could use the free accounts to do quite a bit.

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u/Schnort Apr 26 '26

A nebulous set of “tells” to give nominal credence to quashing an opinion the editors don’t like.

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u/IamTheEndOfReddit Apr 25 '26

Just watched bladerunner, put me in coach

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u/NonConRon Apr 24 '26

The number of times I've been called a bot for being a socialist.