
Facebook developing AI to flag offensive live videos - type0
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ai-video-idUSKBN13Q52M
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visakanv
First thing that comes to mind is that live video that poor lady filmed while
her boyfriend was sitting in the car next to her being shot by police. It was
a very important piece of news. How will Facebook or AI prevent flagging that
video?

> “These are questions that go way beyond whether we can develop AI,” said
> LeCun (FB's director of AI research). “Tradeoffs that I’m not well placed to
> determine.”

I don't want to be alarmist, but this this is symptomatic of something that's
a little bit terrifying. This reminds me of essays I've read about the
development of nuclear weapons. Lots of the people who developed those things
said things like "Oh, I'm just the guy who built the bomb, I'm not well-placed
to determine whether or not it gets used".

I can't directly say that this sort of attitude is going to directly lead to
rogue AI wiping out humanity, but you have to be able to see how this sort of
thing is a little worrying.

A quote comes to mind:

""The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between
the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by
fools and its thinking done by cowards."

When you draw a demarcation between the people developing AI and the people
deciding on the trade-offs...?

I'm usually idealistic and hopeful (I think), but I thought this needed to be
said.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _" The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation
> between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting
> done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."_

Off-topic, but makes me think of the broad line of demarcation between
developers and those talking to customers/end users, practiced by so many
companies...

~~~
visakanv
It's totally on-topic. It's a planning/execution gap.

~~~
coderdude
He's not wrong about it being off-topic. He's wrong about trying to put
something kinda like it in the same conversation. It's typical. We get it all
the time here.

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jfoutz
It's like something out of the hitchhiker's guide.

A group of talented, well compensated engineers are developing a machine to be
offended on my behalf. Hopefully it will also generate a sternly worded letter
for the offender.

Yesterday's science fiction is today's technology. I just didn't imagine that
particular book being such rich fodder for realization.

~~~
visakanv
> A group of talented, well compensated engineers are developing a machine to
> be offended on my behalf

and their leader openly states that he isn't well-placed to make the necessary
trade-offs

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saurik
Why can't I just stop watching something I find offensive, at most flagging it
for later review (to determine if it is actively dangerous in some way) rather
than living in a world where some stupidly biased "intelligence" (whether
human or artificial) gets to determine what is "offensive"? Facebook already
is a massive filter bubble, where my own biases bias who I allow as friends:
isn't that enough to ensure that I effectively only see content I find
reasonable?

I mean, really: I do _not_ find nudity offensive, and nor do _most_ of the
people I know (I would say " _any_ ", but maybe someone is just keeping
quiet). I _definitely_ never found breast feeding offensive, and would even
say I find the notion that Facebook had previously been removing such content
and calling it offensive itself extremely offensive (and it isn't clear to me
that they have truly stopped, though their official policy is now to accept
it).

Are they really going to take the time to correctly retrain all their
algorithms to deal with policy shifts? Is it even correct to try to do this
"live" given that context later in the video might change peoples' ideas about
what the content was showing, where what looked like exhibitionism turns out
to be a political protest? The difference between a live "unedited" news
broadcast (as is being increasingly done: the local TV station and newspaper
where I live have been using Facebook live streaming) and an opinion segment
or narrative is also subtle: will it flag and block live footage of a riot as
"violence"? What happens when the algorithm says "President Trump's State of
the Union is hate speech"? Will they be proudly letting it stop the stream?

Gah.

~~~
tempodox
And so freedom of expression slowly gets chopped away piece by piece with “the
best intentions”. If freedom of expression weren't “offensive”, at least to
some people, it wouldn't need to be protected in the first place. And, whoever
decides what can or can't be said at FB doesn't make that decision based on a
democratic process.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
In a certain sense, our freedom of expression is intrinsically chopped away by
reliance on private platforms with no democratic control and no authentication
of content.

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thr0waway1239
From the article:

"Facebook said it also uses automation to process the tens of millions of
reports it gets each week, to recognize duplicate reports and route the
flagged content to reviewers with the appropriate subject matter expertise."

Everyone who is slightly or highly annoyed by FB's policies surrounding how
hard it is to leave their ecosystem should take note. They already get
millions of reports each week. So just go around randomly flagging all kinds
of harmless videos. I bet in short order you will get banned from their site.

Once that happens, then tell your friends FB banned you for no good reason...
IMHO it is the best possible answer to "What? How can you not be on Facebook?
Are you crazy?"

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eriknstr
Why be dishonest to your friends, though? Besides, seeing how rare it is for
someone to be banned from FB for no good reason, I don't think most people
will believe you; they'll think you did something bad, which you did by
flagging harmless videos, but they might even imagine that what you did to get
banned was much worse.

If you don't like FB and don't want to be there anymore, I suggest instead
removing most things you have on your profile and writing a post explaining
that you want to remain in touch with your friends so you are keeping your
profile in order to still be reachable but that you won't be as active on FB
as you used to any longer because you've come to realize that you don't want
FB to have all this data about you (or if your reason is different then write
that instead). Just keep the motivation really short so that people see that
you have a reason but they don't feel that you are bombarding them with a long
argument that they can not relate to.

~~~
thr0waway1239
>> Just keep the motivation really short so that people see that you have a
reason but they don't feel that you are bombarding them with a long argument
that they can not relate to.

OK, I will definitely keep it in mind because I do have a tendency to waste
other people's time. While I am at it, I will also send a personal note to
Mark Z expressing my profound sorrow that I am not dedicating more of my life
to FB's mission to connect people. Since I am not cheap, I will also attach a
$20 bill to the note to compensate for his loss.

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hobarrera
Here's an algorithm in python that detects if a video (or image) is offensive
to anybody:

    
    
        def is_offensive(content):
            return True

~~~
ulucs
the shell version is much more concise:

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xemoka
Did anyone else watch the Bloomberg video posted yesterday about technology in
Russia[0]? On how VK (Russia's Facebook) has had its CEO replaced twice (once
directly, second time by removing its new owner, mail.ru's CEO) due to
political pressure and censorship.

It seems to me this is entirely something to be concerned about when it comes
to censorship and state controlled media. This is very much to appease the
likes of China and Russia, it will also benefit places such as the USA where
Facebook doesn't want to make those in control look bad (police, elected
officials, oligarchs, autocrats etc). It's bad for business to be against the
rulers, and Facebook has to contend with a lot of different rulers if it want
to expand throughout the world. A benign, bland shade of beige that everyone
buys into and is inoffensive, is more likely to be appreciated by rulers and
advertisers—just look at network television.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hello-world-
russia/?...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hello-world-
russia/?cmpid=BBD113016_BIZ)

~~~
hackermailman
The cynic in me sees this as a way to appease many of the dictatorships in the
developing world FB operates in as a defacto telecom by offering free-wifi
through Internet.org type shenanigans for only FB apps.

These regimes would love FB to offer ways to shut down a live feed being
passed around of a political disaster being broadcasted by local journalists
using FB live, like all those Periscope riot broadcasts in the US. FB can then
avoid the responsibility and bad PR of disabling it and just let their bot
kill it instead.

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anigbrowl
I wonder how many ethicists FB has on staff, and how they feel about the
ethics of getting paid to tell the decision makers what would keep them awake
at night if they were the sort of people who lost sleep over such things.

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reitoei
Solution: Stop using Facebook

~~~
cooper12
This is at the bottom of the thread right now so I'm going to assume people
don't agree with this. However, you're completely right, by continuing to use
Facebook you validate their platform and keep feeding them your data. The
solution is to seek alternative platforms that respect your freedoms or to
abstain from social networks. (<smug>personally I find them to only suffice
for navel-gazing and status signaling</smug>) I understand that due to network
effects it will be really difficult to make friends follow you elsewhere or to
find others, but the alternative is continuing to let Facebook dictate what
you see and feel. For many people, Facebook is "the real world": it's how they
get all their news and find out what's going on with people. We shouldn't
underestimate the power Facebook holds to affect people and the importance of
considering not participating.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
There are three things I want from an alternative:

1) Decentralized, preferably democratic-by-the-users, control. No centralized
server where everything is kept in plaintext.

2) Privacy. I share what I want, and only that. People with whom I don't
connect don't know I exist.

3) Authentication. My online identity is unique to something about me that
exists in meatspace. Whom I connect with can be restricted to people I know in
meatspace. Note that this is the opposite of our normal standard of anonymity:
4chan can be as anonymous as it likes, but a social network for groups of
friends ought to prevent anonymous trolls or ads from flooding into my feed.

Basically, I want a social network on which I own and control my own info, and
on which I keep my IRL identity strictly separated from, for instance, the
anime avatar I pretended to be on various bulletin boards.

Do any existing alternative social networks meet these criteria?

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yAnonymous
Facebook is rapidly turning into a censorship tool.

~~~
pmyjavec
It's also turning into one of the most boring things on the Internet, I would
say all that's keeping it alive is chat.

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moofight
For those who don't have the time / capacity to develop this internally, and
who feel they need to moderate visual content, we have a SaaS offering. We
flag offensive images and videos (including live-streams in private beta)
using Deep Learning.

We are Sightengine ([https://sightengine.com](https://sightengine.com))

