AI video screening still a long way off, says Facebook executive | HT Tech

AI video screening still a long way off, says Facebook executive

Facebook was criticised for allowing the Christchurch attacker to broadcast the shootings live without adequate oversight that could have resulted in quicker take-downs of the video.

By: JEREMY KAHN
| Updated on: May 19 2019, 16:52 IST
FILE PHOTO: Stickers bearing the Facebook logo are pictured at Facebook Inc's F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, U.S., April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Stickers bearing the Facebook logo are pictured at Facebook Inc's F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, U.S., April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo (REUTERS)
FILE PHOTO: Stickers bearing the Facebook logo are pictured at Facebook Inc's F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, U.S., April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Stickers bearing the Facebook logo are pictured at Facebook Inc's F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, U.S., April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo (REUTERS)

Facebook Inc.'s chief artificial intelligence scientist said the company is years away from being able to use software to automatically screen live video for extreme violence.

Yann LeCun's comments follow the March livestream of the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand.

'This problem is very far from being solved,' LeCun said Friday during a talk at Facebook's AI Research Lab in Paris.

Facebook was criticised for allowing the Christchurch attacker to broadcast the shootings live without adequate oversight that could have resulted in quicker take-downs of the video. It also struggled to prevent other users from re-posting the attacker's footage.

Another problem is that there was not enough data to train an AI to reliably detect such videos. 'Thankfully, we don't have a lot of examples of real people shooting other people,' he said.

While there were plenty of examples from movies of simulated violence that could be used for software training, LeCun said a system would have trouble differentiating between real violence and action movies, and would block both -- even though posting something from a movie is allowed.

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Jerome Pesenti, Facebook's vice president of AI, said it was the company's goal to use a combination of human reviewers and automated systems to remove prohibited content -- such as videos of extreme violence -- as soon as possible.

Facebook has made progress in automatically detecting and blocking certain sub-categories of extremist content, the company has said, and can now spot and block the posting of 99% of content linked to the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

But detecting and blocking all extremist content -- regardless of origin -- is a 'very hard problem,' LeCun said.

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First Published Date: 19 May, 16:52 IST
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