If there’s one trend that has emerged in the technology world throughout 2016 it’d be the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Whether it’s things like Alexa or the Google Assistant, Chatbots or something else, it’s clear the world has woken up to Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning and neural networks have all come together to create algorithms and such that, in years to come, could help us solve very real problems. For Facebook, they’re hoping that Artificial Intelligence can help them police their social network, and it’s something that could keep Facebook out of the headlines if it works. Facebook has recently been pushing their new live videos feature, and while this has dramatically increased user engagement for a lot of users and pages, it has led to some questionable videos appearing online, and it’s this that Facebook wants to use AI to police.
According to a Reuters report, Facebook is developing and perfecting an automated system that will flag offensive and inappropriate content being streamed live on Facebook. The network’s head of Applied Machine Learning, Joaquin Candela, says that the key is to make sure that “your computer vision algorithm has to be fast” and that the end goal should be to get a machine to view these videos in the same manner that “a human looks at it, an expert who understands our policies, and takes it down”. There’s a lot of different things to take into consideration when marking a video as inappropriate and there will be concerns of whether or not such a machine will be able to accurately judge with a level head. Given the large amount of users on Facebook, such a system could help them to improve the policing of the network, without spending too long on making a decision about something.
There will be some users that will feel a machine cannot accurately determine what’s appropriate and what isn’t, but Facebook has come under fire a lot recently, for their live videos as well as the issue of “fake news” and the more damage limitation they can put in place could secure a smooth 2017, and with a new President taking office in January, a smoother year is just what Facebook could use.