The fact that "toxicity" is not well-defined or black and white and you'll never be able to reach 100% accuracy is extremely obvious and not very interesting. That's probably why nobody is talking about it.
Well, we probably could throw in the towel. The definition of the word is ever-changing and context-dependent, AND subjective to the receiver. That doesn't sound like something you can train a model for.
If you had access to the reactions of someone reading the content, you could _possibly_ train an agent to spot textual patterns likely to cause the reader to have negative reactions.
You could do a similar thing with a robot DJ, by feeding it a stream of the dancefloor, and training it to keep that dancefloor grooving.
But think about how this is trained. As with all of the authoritarian anti-offence rhetoric (i.e. not person to person politeness, but politeness enforcement), the response should be: who gets to decide?
Some concepts become less offensive over time; some more offensive. 20 years ago gay marriage was offensive in many parts of the world. Should that be codified into our communication tools? Offence is in no way objective, and this will never change.
There is genuine, vast utility in advocating for this sort of thing, but only if you want to be the person with the power to decide what everyone else is allowed to talk about.
Would you say the same about a less divisive speech pattern like a flamebait/flamewar classifier? Because it’s already double with simple heuristics like upvote/comment ratios and seems like a fine fit for a moderator assisted classifier.
Yeah I would say the same. It's also not well defined or black or white but that doesn't mean you have to just give up. You can do better than nothing in both cases.
