Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Facebook increasingly using AI to scan for offensive content

Bruce Brown
By

facebook ai screen offensive computer male facing dark background
Image used with permission by copyright holder
“Content moderation” might sound like a commonplace academic or editorial task, but the reality is far darker. Internationally, there are more than 100,000 people, many in the Philippines but also in the U.S., whose job each day is to scan online content to screen for obscene, hateful, threatening, abusive, or otherwise disgusting content, according to Wired. The toll this work takes on moderators can be likened to post-traumatic stress disorder, leaving emotional and psychological scars that can remain for life if untreated. That’s a grim reality seldom publicized in the rush to have everyone engaged online at all times.

Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube, and other companies may not publicize content moderation issues, but that doesn’t mean the companies aren’t working hard to stop the further harm caused to those who screen visual and written content. The objective isn’t only to control the information that shows up on their sites, but also to build AI systems capable of taking over the most tawdry, harmful aspects of the work. Engineers at Facebook recently stated that AI systems are now flagging more offensive content than humans, according to TechCrunch.

Recommended Videos

Joaquin Candela, Facebook’s director of engineering for applied machine learning, spoke about the growing application of AI to many aspects of the social media giant’s business, including content moderation. “One thing that is interesting is that today we have more offensive photos being reported by AI algorithms than by people,” Candela said. “The higher we push that to 100 percent, the fewer offensive photos have actually been seen by a human.”

Related

The systems aren’t perfect and mistakes happen. In a 2015 report in Wired, Twitter said when its AI system was tuned to recognize porn 99 percent of the time, 7 percent of those blocked images were innocent and filtered incorrectly, such as when photos of half-naked babies or nursing mothers are screened as offensive. The systems will have to learn, and the answer will be deep-learning, using computers to analyze how they, in turn, analyze massive amounts of data.

Another Facebook engineer spoke of how Facebook and other companies are sharing what they’re learning with AI to cut offensive content. “We share our research openly,” Hussein Mehanna, Facebook’s director of core machine learning, told TechCrunch. “We don’t see AI as our secret weapon just to compete with other companies.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Bruce Brown
Bruce Brown
Contributing Editor
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
OpenAI and Microsoft sued by NY Times for copyright infringement
A phone with the OpenAI logo in front of a large Microsoft logo.

The New York Times has become the first major media organization to take on AI firms in the courts, accusing OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, of infringing its copyright by using its content to train AI-powered products such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the media giant claims that “millions” of its copyrighted articles were used to train its AI technologies, enabling it to compete with the New York Times as a content provider.

Read more
Microsoft Copilot: tips and tricks for using AI in Windows
Microsoft Copilot allows you to ask an AI assistant questions within Office apps.

Microsoft's Copilot might not be breaking ground in quite the same way as ChatGPT seemed to when it first debuted, but there are still some useful abilities for this desktop-ready chatbot AI that is now available to pretty much anyone running the latest version of Windows 11. It doesn't have a huge range of abilities yet, confining itself to changing some Windows settings, opening apps for you, and performing the creative writing and web search functions available through its contemporaries.

But you can make Copilot work for you and work well, and there are some tips and tricks you'll want to employ to make the most of it. Here are some of my favorites.
Go hands-free
While the latest natural language AIs might be primarily text-based, many of them now include voice and audio support, and Windows Copilot is much the same. While this might seem like merely a more clunky way to interact with Copilot -- and it is kind of clunky -- this is an important feature because it means you don't have to use your hands to prompt it. Beyond clicking the little microphone button, you can get back to whatever you're doing while asking it a question or requesting something from it.

Read more
2023 was the year of AI. Here were the 9 moments that defined it
A person's hand holding a smartphone. The smartphone is showing the website for the ChatGPT generative AI.

ChatGPT may have launched in late 2022, but 2023 was undoubtedly the year that generative AI took hold of the public consciousness.

Not only did ChatGPT reach new highs (and lows), but a plethora of seismic changes shook the world, from incredible rival products to shocking scandals and everything in between. As the year draws to a close, we’ve taken a look back at the nine most important events in AI that took place over the last 12 months. It’s been a year like no other for AI -- here’s everything that made it memorable, starting at the beginning of 2023.
ChatGPT’s rivals rush to market

Read more