On December 15, Facebook announced to its employees that it is currently creating a tool that will summarize news articles so that users won't have to read the articles anymore. It also announced its early plans for a neural sensor to detect the thoughts of people and translate them into action.
Facebook's new tool
The announcements and the product demos were part of a meeting at the social media giant. The year has hit the company with numerous controversies and lawsuit.
According to Buzzfeed News, the meeting, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, also focused on the "trying year" of the company due to the global pandemic and the backlash they received due to numerous false information that can be posted on Facebook.
Despite this, the leaders of the company stated that Facebook has moved forward and added 20,000 new employees this year. With more people around the world who are working and studying at home, Facebook has experienced record usage, according to Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer. The traffic in March 2020 was the same as that of New Year's Day, which is the busiest period of the year.
Schroepfer stated that their investments in technology are not just about keeping the services running, it is also a way for them to pave the way for breakthrough new experiences that will improve the lives of billions of users around the world.
Among the advancements highlighted by Schroepfer were Facebook's commitments to artificial intelligence. He noted that the company's data centers were receiving new systems that would make them 10 to 30 times faster and will allow Facebook's AI to train itself.
Schroepfer said that AI is the key tool that they are using right now in production to fight hate speech, misinformation and all the hardest content problems that they face. He also noted that Facebook can now detect 95% of all the hate speech on the platform.
AI taking over
In the past few weeks, former Facebook employees have called out the idea that AI could cure the content moderation problems of the company.
While Facebook employs thousands of human moderators, the company made it clear that AI will be used to patrol its platform in the near future, and this idea concerns employees.
A departing employee, Nick Inzucchi, who talked to BuzzFeed News about the plan, stated that AI will not save the company. He added that the plan is a dystopia.
Another employee estimated that even with AI and third-party moderators, the company was deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook, a claim that was denied by Facebook according to The Washington Post.
During the meeting, Facebook also unveiled an AI assistant tool called TLDR, which could help summarize news articles in bullet points so that users would not have to read the whole article. The tool, named after acronym for "too long, didn't read," could also provide audio narration and vocal assistant to answer.
The news about the tool did not sit well with members of the media. The editor-in-chief of WNYC, Audrey Cooper, posted her sentiments on her Twitter account and said that she feels like there is someone in the Facebook headquarters whose sole job is to try and come up with new ways of completely destroying any semblance of intelligence in America.
Related Article: Zuckerberg vs. Facebook: Thousand Workers Stage 'Virtual Walkout' vs. Trump Issue Saying CEO has 'Lack of Backbone'
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Sieeka Khan
