UPDATED 23:37 EDT / JUNE 01 2016

NEWS

Facebook says its new DeepText A.I. will be able to read you like a human

Facebook has made a pretty bold claim. It says it has developed an A.I. called DeepText that can understand the context of what you have written just as good as your average literate reader. It’s better than the average Joe though; Deep Text is somewhat of an avid reader, and also a polyglot.

In a post announcing DeepText Facebook explains, “We built DeepText, a deep learning-based text understanding engine that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands of posts per second, spanning more than 20 languages.”

DeepText was not designed to read your messages and spy on you. Facebook says its purpose is to understand what related posts to show you, or what services to throw at you. While DeepText can figure out if you’re talking about football, or which players you like, Facebook says it’s still dealing with the tricky matter of “slang and word-sense disambiguation”. That’s not surprising, seeing that that’s what every tech company developing similar A.I. is struggling with.

DeepText has already been tested in Messenger, wherein the A.I. learned how to know when someone might need a taxi. Facebook writes, “DeepText is used for intent detection and entity extraction to help realize that a person is not looking for a taxi when he or she says something like, ‘I just came out of the taxi,’ as opposed to, ‘I need a ride.’” This is the major difference, says Facebook, from DeepText and other related A.I.; DeepText is a more thorough reader.

It seems that such a tool could also be used to clamp down on hate speech, or what we might consider dangerous content. Surely the fact that Facebook et al. have just agreed to censor content more stringently aligns with the announcement of technology such as this. It might also seem like an invasion of privacy, having your private messages scanned by Facebook. The company has had lawsuits filed against it on more than one occasion for doing just that.

Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski via Flickr

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