Facebook using artificial intelligence to 'spy' on its users is as scary as it gets
If you thought Facebook was a giant corporation, trying to dominate the market, control your lives and keep an eye on you like Big Brother, you were absolutely right. The social media giant last week released a 6,000-word manifesto, which lists out in detail its plans for the future. In between the lines of that gigantic document, is the mention of something disturbing — essentially how it is planning to use artificial intelligence (AI).
According to DailyMail, in a leaked early addition of the manifesto, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, indicated that the firm would use AI to spy on users, in a bid to “identify risks". Mysteriously enough, however, the final published version has no mention of it. Whether the plan has been removed, or that the company intends to keep this plan a secret for the time being; it is ominous enough.
In an early version of the manifesto given to Associated Press, Zuckerberg said: “The long-term promise of AI is that in addition to identifying risks more quickly and accurately than would have already happened, it may also identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all including terrorists planning attacks using private channels, people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other issues both local and global.”
This paragraph was then removed, and was replaced with, “The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to set the content policy for themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings.”
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| Photo: Mail Today |
"For those who don't make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your personal settings anytime", added Zuckergerg.
This change in the company's policies is sure to open floodgates of ambiguity and false demarcation in terms of what content is classified as. Additionally local variations in rules, and letting people decide their own settings will definitely lead to a lot of confusion regarding how we licence them for different age groups, or make a distinction between nudity that is pornographic and artistic.
According to a Tech Crunch report, at present, Facebook's artificial Intelligence system is delivering 30 per cent of content flags to human mediators — but this will only increase in the future.
Zuckerberg’s memo also warns is, albeit vaguely, of his website’s ever-existent threat to journalism. He uses abstract language in his memo, which claims that Facebook wants to develop “the social infrastructure for community”.
According to a rather cynical (and scary) thinkpiece in The Atlantic, this translates to the fact that Facebook is asking its users to act as unpaid publishers and curators of content, which would ultimately end up meaning that Facebook is “building a global newsroom run by robot editors and its own readers”.