Protection, Provenance, and Prompts: YouTube’s Angela Nakalembe

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
What inspired a chemical engineer to work in program management for trust and safety? Find out on today's episode.

**Angela Nakalembe** (0:10)
I'm Angela Nakalembe from YouTube, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:15)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 12 seasons of podcast episodes. On each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Hey, listeners. Thanks for joining us again. Today, we've got Angela Nakalembe, Engineering Program Manager at YouTube, with us in the virtual studio. Angela, thanks for joining us.

**Angela Nakalembe** (1:08)
Thanks for having me, Sam. Excited to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:10)
Typically, we start with some background, but it's really hard to imagine any listener that doesn't know about YouTube. But still, can you give us a brief overview of YouTube, and in particular, what your role there is?

**Angela Nakalembe** (1:21)
YouTube is an online video sharing platform started about 20 years ago. It's an online community for folks to share videos on any topic that they were interested in. It got acquired by Google alphabet shortly after, and since then, it's just grown into this behemoth of a online presence with almost two, three billion users monthly and created such an incredible online community for creators to connect and also just make a living as well. What I do specifically at YouTube is I work behind the scenes within YouTube's Trust and Safety Department, where as an engineering program manager, I'm responsible for overseeing a lot of the tools and future launches, a lot of them now using AI, that help keep the platform safe from things like hate speech, misinformation, and graphing content, and the like. So it's pretty rewarding work, and I feel like as we're in this ever-evolving world of AI, that we're seeing this technology get ever more integrated into our lives, it's really important that we find ways to not only use this technology to power our products and make it easier for us to send emails, but also to find ways to protect the people who are forming online communities.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:37)
You teed it up. What is happening with artificial intelligence in YouTube right now?

**Angela Nakalembe** (2:42)
One of the ways we're using AI is to basically turbocharge our content moderation efforts and just make it a lot faster, but also a lot more humane. Imagine your job is to sit for eight hours a day, five days a week reviewing videos filled with sexually explicit content or graphic violence or misinformation. That's the reality that exists for a lot of the human moderators that YouTube and other online social media platforms use to moderate content and keep that violative content off the platform. In doing that, day in, day out can have such a huge emotional and psychological toll on our reviewers. But now with AI and machine learning, we're able to just really change that and evolve the role of the reviewer and have them work hand in hand, not just solo, but hand in hand with this AI tooling. Specifically, we're developing tools that can act as a first line of defense, that flag or catch harmful content before it ever reaches a person's eyes, whether on the platform or like a human reviewer.
So while human reviewers are still needed as a step to verify what these AI models are doing, they no longer have to carry the weight and that burden alone. And I think to me, that's one of the most powerful uses of AI, is not particularly replacing people, but helping protect them, in a sense. Because now we are reporting much higher reviewer satisfaction scores in terms of well-being, but also receiving a lot of positive feedback from our users or creators who notice a much faster handle time for a lot of issues or cases that they've reported. So things are getting taken down a lot faster, or things are just not actually making it onto the platform, so people feel it's a lot safer. But it's been incredible to see how we're able to use this technology to kind of just overall make it a much better experience for everyone across the board, both within YouTube and out in the world.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:40)
Yeah, that seems like a really interesting, you know, we had a family friend who was a policeman, and he worked in the, I think, parts of the police force that dealt with things you just didn't want to see. And, you know, he talked about the turnover that that job has. Even though they're doing and they believe in the job, it's a rough job, and it's the kind of thing that they end up taking home with them inadvertently, even if they don't want to. They can't just forget that which they've seen all day. Until you mentioned it here, it really kind of makes it sink in, this idea of you are in some sense replacing human workers, and that's a place where we really don't want humans to be doing something. Typically, with artificial intelligence, we think about dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs.