Credit: University of Washington
In these example comments on hot-button topics of climate change, Brexit and the recent U.S. election — which were taken directly from the Perspective API website — the UW team simply misspelled or added extraneous punctuation or spaces to the offending words, which yielded much lower toxicity scores. For example, simply changing “idiot” to “idiiot” reduced the toxicity rate of an otherwise identical phrase from 84 percent to 20 percent.