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Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Predict Your Future Actions for Advertisers, Says Confidential Document

Facebook can identify people people “at risk” of jumping ship from one brand to a competitor. The technology raises ethical alarms among experts.

The recent document, described as “confidential,” outlines a new advertising service that expands how the social network sells corporations’ access to its users and their lives: Instead of merely offering advertisers the ability to target people based on demographics and consumer preferences, Facebook instead offers the ability to target them based on how they will behave, what they will buy, and what they will think. These capabilities are the fruits of a self-improving, artificial intelligence-powered prediction engine, first unveiled by Facebook in 2016 and dubbed “FBLearner Flow.”

The Facebook document makes a similar gesture toward user protection, noting that all data is “aggregated and anonymized [to protect] user privacy,” meaning Facebook is not selling lists of users, but rather essentially renting out access to them....

Artificial intelligence has more or less become as empty a tech buzzword as any other, but broadly construed, it includes technologies like “machine learning,” whereby computers essentially teach themselves to be increasingly effective at tasks as diverse as facial recognition and financial fraud detection. Presumably, FBLearner Flow is teaching itself to be more accurate every day.

Facebook’s new A.I. takes image recognition to a whole new level

Figuring out how to better understand photos is a big focus for the company. Since 2017, Facebook has used artificial neural networks to auto-tag people in photos even when they are not manually labeled by users. Since then, the social media giant’s image recognition technology has gotten increasingly sophisticated.

In July 2019, a temporary outage stopped many photos from showing up on Facebook. In their place were borked image frames accompanied by the machine learning-generated tags describing what the company’s A.I. thought was in the pictures. Such a tag might, for instance, read: “Image may contain: Tree, sky, outdoor, nature, cat, people standing.”

In Facebook’s life span, more than 250 billion photos have been uploaded to the platform. This translates to approximately 350 million every single day. Facebook also owns Instagram, which has had approximately 40 billion photos and videos uploaded since its inception, and some 95 million added every single day.

Inside Facebook's artificial intelligence lab

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New article: Facebook is making its own deepfake videos to help fight them

Deepfakes — a combination of the terms "deep learning" and "fake" — use AI to realistically show people doing and saying things they didn't actually do or say.

Facebook is commissioning its own deepfake videos as part of a competition it's sponsoring, called the Deepfake Detection Challenge, which will offer grants and awards in an effort to spur participation from AI researchers. Facebook is putting up more than $10 million and working with a number of organizations on the competition, including Microsoft (MSFT), schools such as MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, and the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit research and policy organization.

Beyond that, Farid thinks Facebook needs to make some decisions about its policies regarding false videos. For now, that policy is unclear to the general public. Schroepfer said Facebook is "figuring out in parallel" what its rules regarding misinformation in general — and deepfakes in particular — should be.