Yann LeCun, Facebooks world-renowned AI guru, had some problems with an article written about his company yesterday.
So he did what any of us would do, he went on social media to air his grievances.
Only, he didnt take the fight to Facebook as youd expect.
Instead, over a period of hours, he engaged in a back-and-forth with numerous people on Twitter.
Hao wrotean incredible long-form featureon Facebooks content moderation problem.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
The companys AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech.
Now the man who built them cant fix the problem.
The same could be said of cancer.
LeCun, apparently, didnt like the article.
From my point of view, you piece is full of factual errors and incorrect assumptions of ill intent.
What happened to you?
And they use FB just as much.I blame cable news and talk radio.
Increased polarization via disinformation is uniquely American?
LeCuns tirade began with a tweet announcingnew researchon fairness from the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Team (FAIR).
No, let me clarify.
They wanted this paper to be in my story & gave me an early draft.
Instead, Hao laid bare the essential problem with Facebook: its a spider web.
Those are my words, not Haos.
But, again, those are my words.
For example, if you see a spiderweb in the corner of your barn, thats great!
It means youve got a little arachnid warrior helping you keep nastier bugs out.
Heres a few tidbits from his tweets on the subject:
…
But taking those corrective measure is neither instantaneous, nor easy, nor cheap….
But the volume was such that AI systems had to be developed to automate is as much as possible.
So FB developed the worlds best Burmese-English translation system, so that Eng-speaking moderator could help….
Simultaneously, it developed hateful and violent speech detectors for Burmese.
But data was scarce.
This all takes expertise, time, money, and in this case, the latest AI breakthroughs.
LeCuns core assertion seems to be that stopping misinformation isreally hard.
Well, thats true.
There are a lot of things that are really hard that we havent figured out.
Nuclears great for aircraft carriers and submarines, but not so much for the family station wagon.
Facebook has 2.45 billion users.
But we dont shut Facebook down because its not really a business.
Its a trillion-dollar PR machine for a self-governing entity.Its a country.
It worked out okay for Ford.
There are some problems you cant just throw money and press releases at.
