It’s easier for AI to detect nudity rather than hate speech, Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO released its Q1 earnings. By seeing the earning one can easily say that the company can still make more money and attract more users year-on-year despite staggering scandals. Mark Zuckerberg and other executives, talked about artificial intelligence’s role in automatically detecting harmful content on the platform. Its AI isn’t so good at catching hate speech but has done a great job intercepting terrorist content. Some things are just easier for robots to spot, the CEO argued.

Mark Zuckerberg said,

“One of the pieces of criticism we get that I think is fair is we’re much better able to enforce our nudity policies, for example, than we are hate speech, the reason for that is it’s much easier to make an AI system that can detect a nipple than it is to determine what is linguistically hate speech, so this is something I think we will make progress on and we’ll get better at over time. These are not unsolvable problems.”

According to the experts, computer vision is among the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence while fields like natural processing are not known for making that much progress, making the robot feel things or understand the context is quite hard. For Facebook to overcome these challenges of AI, tackling the nuances of language dialects, context, and whether or not a simple statement qualifies as hate speech could take years.

The CEO further added,
“We’re shifting over the next few years to a much more proactive model of moderation, the combination of building AI and hiring what is going to be tens of thousands of people working on these problems — I think you will see us making very meaningful progress going forward.”

Facebook is having the annual developer conference next week, F8, we could be seeing additional AI services for Facebook’s family of apps.