AI to Deter Bullying and Suicide: Are We that Helpless?

AI has been applied to predicting consumer behavior, facial recognition, to defeating the best of humankind at our most complicated board games like Go. Now, Artificial Intelligence might be stepping up to help with the most human tasks: helping protecting the most vulnerable members in society, but has it really come to this?

 

The BBC, recently wrote a piece on a upcoming new application for AI, to censor internet bullying, and predict whether a person with suicidal tendencies will attempt to commit suicide after committing self-harm.

“Scientists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Florida State University trained machine learning algorithms to look at the health records of patients who self-harm. The algorithms were able to predict whether a patient would attempt to end their life in the week following an instance of self-harm, with an accuracy of 92%.”

The statistical results appear very promising that AI technology can be utilized to help predict, and possibly prevent in bullying and suicide, but we should not leave it to technology altogether.

 

A school board in the city of Otsu, Japan has announced its plan to use AI to predict how suspected cases of school bullying might evolve in the future.

“the school will feed the AI information about 9,000 suspected bullying cases reported by Otsu’s elementary and junior high schools between 2012 and 2018.”, reports Futurism.

 

Is this possibly the beginning of an AI orientated administration of society? Evidently, AI has already took the corner for casual dating; Dating apps use artificial intelligence to help search for love.