Facebook Spares Humans By Fighting Offensive Photos With AI (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via TechCrunch: Facebook tells TechCrunch that its artificial intelligence systems now report more offensive photos than humans do. Typically when users upload content that is deemed offensive, it has to be seen and flagged by at least one human worker or user. Such posts that violate terms of service can include content that is hate speech, threatening or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence. The content that workers have to dig through is obviously not great, and may lead to various psychological illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder. AI is helping to eliminate such a terrible job as it can scan images that are uploaded before anyone ever sees them. Facebook's AI already "helps rank News Feed stories, read aloud the content of photos to the vision impaired and automatically write closed captions for video ads that increase view time by 12 percent," writes TechCrunch. Facebook's Director of Engineering for Applied Machine Learning Joaquin Candela tells TechCrunch, "One thing that is interesting is that today we have more offensive photos being reported by AI algorithms than by people. The higher we push that to 100 percent, the fewer offensive photos have actually been seen by a human." One risk of such an automated system is that it could censor art and free expression that may be productive or beautiful, yet controversial. The other more obvious risk is that such a system could take jobs away from those in need.

Comments

What could possibly go wrong?

[Bruce66423]

Skynet get to control what I'm posting. That will end well.

Re:People In Need

[advocate_one]

how good will it be at differentiating from artistic nipples, male nipples, offensive female nipples, accidental nipples? Until it can 100% spot and block only the offensive female nipples there's always a job for you...

Re:"Post traumatic stress disorder"

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I've been more traumatized by not seeing boobs when I hoped I would. :(

I was just about to see them, but then something happened and didn't. I was depressed for weeks.

Seeing boobs would have uplifted me and buoyed my spirits.