Dublin, 04 August 2020: In this world of fake news, internet trolls, and the prevalence of toxicity across the web, coupled with more rigorous regulation, journalists and others involved in media today need to be extra vigilant when publishing content.
The team at CaliberAI, led by the father son duo Conor and Neil Brady, have come up with an AI solution to improve the quality and standard of public discourse across traditional and online media. The platform, which is based on machine learning, can pick up potentially defamatory text and flag it for human review – almost like a spell check for libel. This extra set of eyes will augment and enhance the role of the news editor. Given the decreasing funding available across the traditional publishing industry, coupled with the increase in the legal and commercial liability laws for online media across the US, EU, and beyond, the need for an automated solution is timely.
Last week on ADAPT Radio, Neil Brady discussed where the Caliber team sees the opportunities for an automated platform like CaliberAI, and how shifts in the current political climate in the US may no longer shield online platforms from liability from dangerous posts that are published on their platforms by users. Neil predicts that it is only a matter of time before social media platforms will be held to account and that automated platforms like Caliber must now play the role of both editor and ethicist.
The choice of route to market through the EI Commercial Fund has enabled Caliber to access “top notch“ scientists through Trinity College Dublin and the ADAPT Centre. The Caliber team is made up of expert collaborators from industry, media and academia with multi disciplinary skill sets: journalists, developers, linguists, computer scientists, and machine learning engineers. They are working to develop super high-quality datasets to improve their CaliberAI Annotator tool that will train the system to recognise defamatory or toxic language and suggest neutral language as an alternative.
Neil describes his own journey working within the ethics and media space, from his early days as a journalist with the Sunday Tribune to now co-founding Caliber AI as a “family business” with his father Conor Brady. It’s something they had always talked of doing together, he says and this is a timely opportunity for both founders to bring their own flavour of experience to the Caliber table.
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