Facebook is developing a news-summarising AI called TL;DR

Facebook is developing an AI called TL;DR which summarises news into shorter snippets.

Anyone who’s spent much time on the web will know what TL;DR stands for⁠—but, for everyone else, it’s an acronym for “Too Long, Didn’t Read”.

It’s an understandable sentiment we’ve all felt at some point. People lead busy lives. Some outlets now even specialise in short, at-a-glance news.

The problem is, it’s hard to get the full picture of a story in just...

16 December 2020 | Facebook

Information Commissioner clears Cambridge Analytica of influencing Brexit

A three-year investigation by the UK Information Commissioner's office has cleared Cambridge Analytica of electoral interference.

Cambridge Analytica was accused in March 2018 of using AI tools and big data to influence the results of the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. Most objective observers probably felt the case was overblown, but it's taken until now to be confirmed.

“From my review of the materials recovered by the investigation I have found...

8 October 2020 | Ethics

Facebook uses AI to help people support each other

Facebook has deployed an AI system which matches people needing support with local heroes offering it.“United we stand, divided we fall” is a clichéd saying—but tackling a pandemic is a collective effort. While we’ve all seen people taking selfish actions, they’ve been more than balanced out by those helping to support their communities.

Facebook has been its usual blessing and a curse during the pandemic. On the one hand, it's helped people to stay connected and...

2 October 2020 | Facebook

Facebook pledges crackdown on deepfakes ahead of the US presidential election

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Facebook has pledged to crack down on misleading deepfakes ahead of the US presidential election later this year.

Voter manipulation is a concern for any functioning democracy and deepfakes provide a whole new challenge for social media platforms.

A fake video of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, went viral last year after purportedly showing her slurring her words as if she was intoxicated. The clip shows how even a relatively...

8 January 2020 | Deepfakes

Facebook will teach its AI to spot shootings using videos of UK police firearms training

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Facebook is using videos of British police firearms training to teach an AI to quickly spot shootings broadcast on its platform and limit their exposure.

Live-streaming poses a very modern but serious problem. As evident with the white supremacist attack in Christchurch in March, live-streams of terrorism can quickly go viral and taking down videos manually is often a slow process.

Automation can step-in to help identify and remove content to prevent terrorists from...

18 September 2019 | Law Enforcement

Esteemed consortium launch AI natural language processing benchmark

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A research consortium featuring some of the greatest minds in AI are launching a benchmark to measure natural language processing (NLP) abilities.

The consortium includes Google DeepMind, Facebook AI, New York University, and the University of Washington. Each of the consortium’s members believe a more comprehensive benchmark is needed for NLP than current solutions.

The result is a benchmarking platform called SuperGLUE which replaces an older platform called GLUE...

15 August 2019 | Facebook

Facebook lends its AI powers to the OpenStreetMap community

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Facebook is providing its Map With AI service to the largest open-source mapping project, OpenStreetMap.

Whereas mapping efforts from Google and Apple focus on navigating major cities, OpenStreetMap aims to ensure the smallest dirt paths are mapped.

Mapping the whole Earth is no small task: a sizeable local community helps, but it’s an impossible task manually both due to scale and often difficult to make out imagery.

In a Facebook blog post, mapping expert...

24 July 2019 | Facebook

Facebook outage gave a glimpse at how its AI analyses images

Facebook’s issue displaying images yesterday gave users an interesting look at how the social media giant’s AI analyses their uploads.

An outage yesterday meant Facebook users were unable to see uploaded images, providing a welcome respite from the usual mix of food and baby photos. In their place, however, was some interesting text.

Text in the placeholder where the image should have been displayed showed how Facebook’s AI automatically tagged the...

4 July 2019 | Facebook

Zuckerberg is deepfaked a month after Facebook refused to remove others

A deepfake of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making the rounds a month after his company refused to remove similar videos.

Last month, Facebook refused to remove a deepfake video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rather than making Pelosi appear to say things she never did, the video aimed to portray her as being intoxicated.

Deepfakes have the potential to spread misinformation and damage the reputation of individuals. Particularly in the world of politics and...

12 June 2019 | Society

Lack of STEM diversity is causing AI to have a ‘white male’ bias

A report from New York University's AI Now Institute has found a predominantly white male coding workforce is causing bias in algorithms.

The report highlights that – while gradually narrowing – the lack of diverse representation at major technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook is causing AIs to cater more towards white males.

For example, at Facebook just 15 percent of the company's AI staff are women. The problem is even more substantial at...

18 April 2019 | Ethics