Facebook is using the approximate 3.5 billion images stored on Instagram to build ever-more sophisticated artificial intelligence, and Instagram users' social lives provide troves of valuable data that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.
Facebook announced Wednesday that it is using the images, combined with user-added hashtags such as #dog or #sunset, to train artificial intelligence algorithms to understand and identify objects displayed in the images.
“We rely almost entirely on hand-curated, human-labeled data sets. If a person hasn’t spent the time to label something specific in an image, even the most advanced computer vision systems won’t be able to identity it,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, said onstage at F8, Facebook’s mostly-annual conference, according to The Verge.
Facebook was able to use hashtag-labeled Instagram images to train its computer vision and object recognition models.
“We’ve produced state-of-the-art results that are 1 to 2 percent better than any other system on the ImageNet Benchmark,” Schroepfer said.
Although Facebook’s approach is practical, it also raises privacy concerns for the social media giant, an issue that has raised the public’s hackles recently and led to two days of Congressional testimony by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
At present, Facebook already has a facial recognition program that allows users to automatically tag photos of people.
The company said this new effort will help it automatically spot and scrub such things as terrorist propaganda, nudity, violence, spam, and hate speech.
“Until very recently we often had to rely on reactive reports. We had to wait for something bad to be spotted by someone and do something about it,” Schroepfer said, The Verge reported. “This is why we are so focused on core AI research. We require new breakthroughs, and we require new technologies to solve problems all of us want to solve.”
People on Twitter weren’t quite so enthusiastic.
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