Social media can be nasty sometimes. If you’ve ever read some of the YouTube comments online, you might lose a bit of faith for humanity.
Humans are generally good at this kind of parsing, and machines are generally bad. Last June, however, Facebook announced that it had built a text classification engine to help machines interpret words in context.
But it looks like the good folks of Facebook (who own Instagram) are trying to solve the problem on their platforms. Not too long ago, Facebook acquired an artificial tool called DeepText. This tool is designed to mimic the way language works in our brains.
Facebook has decided to use this new AI tool for Instagram. Starting today, Instagram will filter out “nasty” comments from Instagram. If you post a picture and someone posts a comment which is considered racists, Instagram will filter out that comment and make it disappear. The interesting thing is that the person who typed out the comment will see it on their phone but it will actually not appear to others.
The filter will only be available in English at first, but will soon be available in other languages.
Not Perfect But Close
This is not a perfect system though. Some comments will still be able to go through depending on how it’s worded. Some comments may even be misconstrued as “nasty” and may get filtered out.
But the system will learn over time.
But if you want to see all comments that come in, you can easily turn it off. You just have to click the ellipses in the settings menu and then click Comments.
It should be interesting to see whether an AI tool like this can be used on other platforms such as Twitter.
I know some people (mostly celebrities) will definitely welcome this AI tool.
