Facebook AI 'assistant' could save you from embarrassment

For many users, Facebook holds a large amount of information about their life — pictures of family and friends, habits and preferences, activities — and that information is usually shuttled out to a large group of individuals. This is a good thing in many ways, but the ease with which it allows sharing has been many folks' undoing. Over-sharing is a big problem, of course, but also drunken sharing and its various subsets. It's no secret Facebook has been putting a lot of effort into developing deep learning artificial intelligence, and in the future that AI might save you from these common, and often embarrassing, problems.Wired recently spoke to Yann LeCun, head of the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, about the social network's various AI ambitions and what they could potentially lead to in the future. Among the discussion was talk about a digital assistant of sort, one that leverages artificial intelligence to guide users towards making wiser decisions when posting.

This AI assistant would learn to recognize the difference between a picture of the user when sober and when drunk, for example, and recognize when he or she is trying to upload pictures that would probably result in morning regret.

As an example, says LeCun, it would be like this assistant pointing out before letting you do something, "Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?" The technology could offer more than just digital babysitting, however, also doing things like notifying you if a picture you're in is posted elsewhere on Facebook by someone you don't know.

SOURCE: Wired