Should your mom see this? Facebook software prevents users from posting drunk photos

While its purpose might serve a very specific audience, the new condition-status recognition software that Facebook is working on is, generally speaking, quite impressive.

Basically, the point of the new program is to prevent Facebook users from posting unflattering photos of themselves while they are drunk or otherwise inebriated due to other situational influences. 

The company is able to achieve this high-level filtration system by combining image recognition software with custom-written artificial intelligence. Doing this allows the network to identify photos being uploaded unlike those posted in the past. When such an occurrence is detected, it will ask the user a question along the lines of: “Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

The program was revealed by the head of Facebook artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, who said the ultimate goal is build a Facebook digital assistant — one that, maybe a bit further down the road, might even be able to identify when another Facebook-ee has uploaded a photo of the digital assistant’s master user without his / her permission. It’s similar to Facebook’s current image recognition technology, which identifies faces and allows users to appropriately tag them, but a few steps more advanced. 

This is not the first time Facebook has introduced artificial intelligence to one of its programs — recently, it began using AI to examine user behavior and determine what news items show up in the user’s feed. It’s been reported that the next step will be to institute a piece of software that analyzes the text in a user’s update and recommend appropriate hashtags. 

LeCun also suggested that down the road the company’s Digital Assistant might be used to mediate interaction between friends. 

The programs that Facebook is building right now are definitely advanced, but they are the type that will in all likelihood be controversial for consumers and privacy advocates, both of whom will likely demand that these sorts of services be opt-in only, and not default for every user.

How Facebook approaches the adoption of such recognition technologies will be worth following, as the company has had many a well-documented stumble when it comes to rolling out new products and services to its user base.

Via BBC