Facebook’s advanced AI may stop you uploading drunken selfies one day

Social networks tend to act as a permanent record of your life, chronicling the good and the bad for the whole world to see. Restraint is all well and good, but if you’ve had one too many restraint tends to goes out of the window– meaning your drunken pictures end up plastered all over your profile. Luckily Facebook’s trying to stop that from happening.

The company is reportedly working on an advanced AI system that will analyse pictures being uploaded and determine whether or not anyone in the picture is drunk. If someone is drunk, it’ll warn you against posting the picture.

According to Wired, the system will “tap you on the shoulder and say: Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

But Yann LeCun, a researcher and overseer of Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, has made it clear the company is aware that having intelligent machines sifting through all your personal data might not be an exciting prospect, steps will be taken to ensure that people’s information is kept safe.

But the plans don’t stop at preventing the world seeing your drunken antics, since LeCun also mentioned that one day the system could warn you if someone is trying to upload a photo of you without your permission. How long it will be before either of these features are implemented is unclear, but it does sound fairly useful.

Tom Pritchard