Artificial intelligence being developed to identify embarrassing photos and ask if users really want to post them on the social network

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The end of the shameful drunken selfie could be nigh: Facebook is developing artificial intelligence that will ask if users really want to post pictures of themselves and friends under the influence.



The “deep learning” system will analyse photos and other Facebook actions and identify potentially embarrassing elements.

“Imagine that you had an intelligent digital assistant which would mediate your interaction with your friends and also with content on Facebook,” Yann LeCun, Facebook’s chief of its artificial intelligence research lab told Wired.

‘Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?’

It could look at what users upload and virtually say “uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?” he explained.

LeCun is a New York University researcher in machine learning who now heads Facebook’s AI research. The researchers focus on using deep learning, a section of AI being heavily invested in by not only Facebook but other technology companies including Google.

Deep learning was the focus of Google’s purchase of the British AI startup Deepmind, which spawned a new computer science research partnership with Oxford University.

‘An AI-complete problem’

The aim for Facebook’s “digital assistant” is that it will analyse every action by a user with the social network, beyond photos to videos and interactions, and give them more control such as notifications when other users post unauthorised photos .

“You will have a single point of contact to mediate your interaction but also to protect your private information,” explained LeCun. He added that “you need a machine to really understand content and understand people and be able to hold all that data. That is an AI-complete problem.”

AI-complete is the term used to describe the most difficult challenges in artificial intelligence research - equivalent to creating human-level intelligence. That means it is a long way from becoming reality.

Facebook’s existing AI technology can identify faces in photos, recognising people and suggesting tags for them. The service can be turned off.

For now, LeCun has shorter term goals set closer to the behaviour of Google and Apple’s digital assistants Google Now and Siri, answering short questions and interpreting natural language.

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