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Facebook artificial intelligence (AI) could someday stop you in your tracks as you drunkenly post photos of yourself at a party for all the world (and your mom, and your boss) to see.
Or, at least, that’s what Director of AI Research at Facebook Yann LeCun says he’s hoping to get working, using a form of AI called “deep learning”.
LeCun, the New York University researcher and machine-learning guru who now oversees Facebook’s year-old Artificial Intelligence Research lab, told Wired that one of the lab’s next goals is to craft a virtual assistant who can recognize unwise posting behavior and then virtually tap us on the shoulder to say something along these lines:
Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?
Deep learning has also been called a rebranding of neural networks, where the basic idea is to build machines that function like the human brain.
Whereas past technologies such as Google search have tried to do that by rapidly analyzing huge amounts of data, researchers such as LeCun are instead aiming to build massive neural networks that mimic our brains.
Not that we can claim to understand exactly how our own brains work, as pointed out recently by Michael I. Jordan, one of the world’s most respected authorities on machine learning.
But Facebook’s deep learning algorithms are already at a point where they can examine our overall Facebook behaviour – a capability that it relies on as it tries to figure out what News Feed content we’re likely to click on versus which content prompts us to lunge for the “hide” button.
According to Wired, those algorithms will soon also analyze the text we type into status posts, automatically suggesting relevant hashtags.
LeCun and his team plan to dive yet deeper still into understanding Facebook data in even more complex ways, to the point where the network can point us in directions we might not have gone on our own.
Wired quotes LeCun:
Imagine that you had an intelligent digital assistant which would mediate your interaction with your friends, and also with content on Facebook.
If you don’t cotton on to the idea of your face being recognized and filed away somewhere in Facebook Dataland, and/or if you’re not too keen on the notion that technology’s going to morph into a nanny state that urges you away from making truly embarrassing Facebook posts, LeCun assures us that this is about more control over online identity, not less.
For example, he envisions a Facebook that’s on alert, keeping an eye out for your data, and could thus give you a heads-up when, for example, someone you don’t know posts your photo without your say-so:
You will have a single point of contact to mediate your interaction but also to protect your private information.
Will the protection be worth whatever tradeoffs are implied by a more powerful, approaching-omniscient Facebook?
Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section below.
Image of girl on toilet courtesy of Shutterstock.
Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to call this “A.I.?” Does it/Will it actually “think” and “decide” or just create an “evolving” DB to run checks against.
These facebook articles are much more fun and amusing after you’ve deleted your facebook account. Facebook is like a nonsense test. The company keeps pulling this kind of nonsense and you keep deciding if this is the final straw before account deletion. For me, it was FB manipulating my feed to stop showing posts from friends/family who where were geographically distant.
*clippy* Hi you seem to still be using Facebook! Do you want help with that!
The fact is that the young & brash Zuckerberg pissed off some of his user base when he would not let users control their privacy on Facebook in recent years.
The “features” they have been rolling out over the last few months have been the most basic settings that should have always been there for users… Now of course they all act as if they’re doing us all a favor.
Facebook is a monster and they have paid out a LOT of money from all their privacy misteps. So much negative publicity has made me very closed on Facebook. And most friends I know there also keep their activity very focused and limited.
Facebook’s practices have hurt that precious “user experience” Zuckerberg always blabs about.
And now, all this talk about users being in control of their content is all front-end damage control. Many people have left Facebook or do not interact with it as robustly as Facebook would want so, they have their staff working overtime and saying byte-worthy things like how the creepy-McCreeperson AI is supposed to “protect us” and save us from ourselves.
I mean, Christ! How about you stop sharing all our data with every marketing bot out there? Oh and while you’re at it, stop giving us all up to the NSA every five seconds, something Zuckerberg himself blatantly lied about til the Snowden revelation over a year ago.
I know I’m not the only person who is weirded out by Facebook working hard to learn more about me and use that info for their gain.
Sounds like you still use Facebook, though..a bit like the people we hear from who can’t say a nice thing about Microsoft because the company ended support for XP, but who won’t consider switching away from Microsoft’s products, even though (free) alternatives are available.
Heh. I arrived here from a story written today (2016 06 02) and left wondering how soon Facebook’s AI and facial recognition will associate the model posing for this article’s photo with folks actually prone to public and reprehensible behavior.