Q&A: Facebook’s CTO Is at War With Bad Content, and AI Is His Best Weapon
Photo: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer leads the company’s AI and integrity efforts. Facebook’s challenge is huge. Billions of pieces of content—short and long posts, images, and combinations of the two—are uploaded to the site daily from around the world. And any tiny piece of that—any phrase, image, or video—could contain so-called bad content. In its early days, Facebook relied on simple computer filters to identify potentially problematic posts by their words, such as those containing profanity. These automatically filtered posts, as well as posts flagged by users as offensive, went to humans for adjudication. In 2015, Facebook started using artificial intelligence to cull images that contained nudity, illegal goods, and other prohibited content; those images identified as possibly problematic were sent to humans for further review. By 2016, more offensive photos were reported by Facebook’s AI systems than by Facebook users (and that Continue reading Q&A: Facebook’s CTO Is at War With Bad Content, and AI Is His Best Weapon