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

Re:When offensive becomes politically inconvenient

[AmiMoJo]

Remember when newly inaugurated Pres. Obama thought it'd be a good idea for FB login to be your official ID?

Nope, and the link you provided doesn't say he did. In fact what he suggested is something that many nerds have been asking for.

Imagine you could create pseudo-anonymous identities. You could have them signed by trusted government agencies to say that they have confirmed your real identity, without the need to necessarily share it with other organizations. If it gets compromised I can mark it as dead and set up a new one. Make it distributed, maybe block chain based.

He didn't suggest Facebook at all. You made that up entirely.