Facebook on Thursday announced that it is developing artificial intelligence algorithms to root out offensive content.
It also released a series of videos aimed at getting students interested in pursuing AI research in college.
The algorithms can detect nudity, violence, and other content that doesn't conform to Facebook's community guidelines, Reuters reports. Facebook has long relied on users to flag offensive posts, but following outcry over the removal of an iconic Vietnam war photograph and its role in spreading fake news, among other controversies, adding AI algorithms could one day help it police everything its users upload.
For now, the algorithms are in a limited testing phase on the Facebook Live video-streaming platform, and humans still have the final say on which streams get removed. The tests are designed to overcome two challenges, according to Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning.
"One, your computer vision algorithm has to be fast, and I think we can push there, and the other one is you need to prioritize things in the right way so that a human looks at it, an expert who understands our policies, and takes it down," Candela told Reuters.
Of course, to continue its investment in AI, Facebook will need talented engineers, people who are in chronically short supply in Silicon Valley. So its AI promotional videos, hosted by head of AI research Yann LeCun, are designed to pique students' curiosity by touting the societal benefits of convolutional neural networks, deep learning, and other AI phenomena.
"Artificial intelligence is not magic, but we have already seen how it can make seemingly magical advances in scientific research and contribute to the everyday marvel of identifying objects in photos, recognizing speech, driving a car, or translating an online post into dozens of languages," Facebook wrote in a blog post.