Facebook is home to the rich pageant of human experience, which is a good thing when, say, people come together to congratulate their friends and family on an achievement or personal milestone, and a bad thing when it comes to literally any other topic. Facebook, in its eternal crusade to try to keep our horribleness off their pristine Internet, is now building an AI to keep at least some of your personal train wrecks off social media.
As Wired explains, the idea is that of:
“a kind of digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. This assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”
It’s one of the ideas out of Facebook’s R&D arm, using a technology called “Deep Learning,” which is also a movie that starred John Holmes in 1973. Essentially, the algorithm would learn the difference between impaired users and sober users. So when a photo of tanked you shows up, the site can put the brakes on posting while you sober up and realize that, huh, you really do have genitalia drawn on your face.
They even imagine it going further. If, for example, you’re about to say something awful to a friend on a comments section, the site’s AI could step in and ask you if you really want to make fun of their speech impediment/failed business/dead relatives.
This does have a few benefits beyond just avoiding social self-immolation. For example, if Facebook can recognize you, it can also recognize when somebody is posting a photo of you that you may not be aware of, so you can keep embarrassing photos in general off the site. On the other hand, giving an AI a complete psychological profile of you would also be an incredibly handy marketing tool, so we have a few reservations. But at least it won’t be used by the machines to control our behavior and make us subservient to them without our ever noticing.
Right?