The meeting included discussions about new products, such as chatbots for Messenger and WhatsApp that can converse with different personas. Additionally, Meta announced new features for Instagram, including the ability to modify user photos via text prompts and create emoji stickers for messaging services.

These developments come at a crucial time for Meta, as the company has faced financial struggles and an identity crisis in recent years. Investors criticised Meta for focusing too heavily on its metaverse ambitions and not paying enough attention to AI.

Meta’s decision to focus on AI tools follows in the footsteps of its competitors, including Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat, who have received significant investor attention for their generative AI products. Unlike the aforementioned rivals, Meta is yet to release any consumer-facing generative AI products.

To address this gap, Meta has been reorganising its AI divisions and investing heavily in infrastructure to support its AI product needs.

Zuckerberg expressed optimism during the company meeting, stating that advancements in generative AI have made it possible to integrate the technology into “every single one” of Meta’s products. This signifies Meta’s intention to leverage AI across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

In addition to consumer-facing tools, Meta also announced a productivity assistant called Metamate for its employees. This assistant is designed to answer queries and perform tasks based on internal company information.

Meta is also exploring open-source models, allowing users to build their own AI-powered chatbots and technologies. However, critics and competitors have raised concerns about the potential misuse of these tools, as they can be utilised to spread misinformation and hate speech on a larger scale.

Zuckerberg addressed these concerns during the meeting, emphasising the value of democratising access to AI. He expressed hope that users would be able to develop AI programs independently in the future, without relying on frameworks provided by a few large technology companies.

Despite the increased focus on AI, Zuckerberg reassured employees that Meta would not be abandoning its plans for the metaverse, indicating that both AI and the metaverse would remain key areas of focus for the company.

The success of these endeavours will determine whether Meta can catch up with its competitors and solidify its position among tech leaders in the rapidly-evolving landscape.

(Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash)

Related: Meta’s open-source speech AI models support over 1,100 languages

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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Facebook has had a particularly rough time as of late, with a series of Wall Street Journal reports in particular claiming the company knows that “its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm” and “despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them”.

Some of the allegations include:

• An algorithm change made Facebook an “angrier” place and CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted suggested fixes because “they would lead people to interact with Facebook less”
• Employees flag human traffickers, drug cartels, organ sellers, and more but the response is “inadequate or nothing at all”
• Facebook’s tools were used to sow doubt about the severity of Covid-19’s threat and the safety of vaccines
• The company’s own engineers have doubts about Facebook’s public claim that AI will clean up the platform.
• Facebook knows Instagram is especially toxic for teen girls
• A “secret elite” are exempt from the rules

The reports come predominantly from whistleblower Frances Haugen who grabbed “tens of thousands” of pages of documents from Facebook, plans to testify to Congress, and has filed at least eight SEC complaints claiming that Facebook lied to shareholders about its own products.

It makes you wonder whether former British Deputy PM Nick Clegg knew just how much he’d be taking on when he became Facebook’s VP for Global Affairs and Communications.

Over the weekend, Clegg released a blog post but instead chose to focus on Facebook’s plan to hire 10,000 Europeans to help build its vision for the metaverse—a suspiciously timed announcement that many believe was aimed to counter the negative news.

However, Facebook didn’t avoid the media reports. Guy Rosen, VP of Integrity at Facebook, also released a blog post over the weekend titled Hate Speech Prevalence Has Dropped by Almost 50% on Facebook.

According to Facebook’s post, hate speech prevalence has dropped 50 percent over the last three quarters:

When the company began reporting on hate speech metrics, just 23.6 percent of removed content was proactively detected by its systems. Facebook claims that number is now over 97 percent and there are now just five views of hate speech for every 10,000 content views on Facebook.

“Data pulled from leaked documents is being used to create a narrative that the technology we use to fight hate speech is inadequate and that we deliberately misrepresent our progress,” Rosen said. “This is not true.”

One of the reports found that Facebook’s AI couldn’t identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants, and couldn’t separate cockfighting from car crashes in one specific incident. Haugen claims the company only takes action on 3-5 percent of hate and 0.6 percent of violence and incitement content. 

In the latest exposé from the WSJ published on Sunday, Facebook employees told the outlet they don’t believe the company is capable of screening for offensive content. Employees claim that Facebook switched to largely using AI enforcement of the platform’s regulations around two years ago, which served to inflate the apparent success of its moderation tech in public statistics.

Clegg has called the WSJ’s reports “deliberate mischaracterisations” that use quotes from leaked material to create “a deliberately lop-sided view of the wider facts.”

Few people underestimate the challenge that a platform like Facebook has in catching hateful content and misinformation across billions of users – and doing so in a way that doesn’t suppress free speech – but the company doesn’t appear to be helping itself in overpromising what its AI systems can do and, reportedly, even willfully ignoring fixes to known problems over concerns they would reduce engagement.

(Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash)

Find out more about Digital Transformation Week North America, taking place on 9-10 November 2021, a virtual event and conference exploring advanced DTX strategies for a ‘digital everything’ world.

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Last month, Facebook refused to remove a deepfake video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rather than making Pelosi appear to say things she never did, the video aimed to portray her as being intoxicated.

Deepfakes have the potential to spread misinformation and damage the reputation of individuals. Particularly in the world of politics and increasingly sophisticated state disinformation campaigns, it’s easy to imagine the danger they pose.

Pelosi later told California’s KQED: “I think they have proven — by not taking down something they know is false — that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election.”

Governments and activists have called on social networks to assist in the detection and deletion of such videos. Now it seems that campaigners are targeting social network executives with deepfakes in a bid to make them take such videos more seriously.

In the deepfake of Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO is portrayed to say: “Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures.”

Fortunately for Zuckerberg, the deepfake is not malicious and most people will know it’s not real. The video both helps to make social networks assist more in tackling deepfakes while also raising public awareness.

Society is going through a period of serious change when it comes to knowing what’s real and fake. Many now question what they read because anyone could have written it and the issue of fake news is well-publicised. Most people, however, are still accustomed to believing that someone is saying what they are when they can see them doing it.

Zuckerberg’s deepfake was created Israeli startup Canny AI. The firm has also debuted fake videos with the likes of President Trump and Kim Kardashian as part of a commissioned art installation called Spectre that was on display at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and their use cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

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