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Facebook's AI Unlocks the Ability To Search Photos By What's in Them (techcrunch.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the sounds-creepy dept.
An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: Initially used to improve the experience for visually impaired members of the Facebook community, the company's Lumos computer vision platform is now powering image content search for all users. This means you can now search for images on Facebook with keywords that describe the contents of a photo, rather than being limited by tags and captions. To accomplish the task, Facebook trained an ever-fashionable deep neural network on tens of millions of photos. Facebook's fortunate in this respect because its platform is already host to billions of captioned images. The model essentially matches search descriptors to features pulled from photos with some degree of probability.
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Facebook's AI Unlocks the Ability To Search Photos By What's in Them More

Facebook's AI Unlocks the Ability To Search Photos By What's in Them

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  • Still Not AI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:44AM (#53795899)
    Sorry, but this is still not AI.
    • That really depends on how you define AI. If you want to define AI as purely something that can hold a realistic conversation with you then no, it's not. However if you agree that a machine that demonstrating the ability to learn from examples then I'm sure many would argue this is a form of AI, but that's why why careful people describe it as machine learning instead. Just like intelligent search was often called AI in the past by the press.

      • Re:Still Not AI (Score:5, Funny)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:55AM (#53795991) Homepage Journal

        Probably a good thing it's not too intelligent. Can you imagine if google was a person, the kind of sanity destroying crap it would have to deal with? Facebook's poor AI will be bombarded by dubious requests.

        • Re:Still Not AI (Score:4, Insightful)

          by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @02:24PM (#53797449)

          Probably a good thing it's not too intelligent. Can you imagine if google was a person, the kind of sanity destroying crap it would have to deal with? Facebook's poor AI will be bombarded by dubious requests.

          My opinion of the average Facebook user is about as high as my opinion of people on AOL back in the 90s. If it were a full fledged AI there is no doubt that the assumption it drew from its average sampling of humans would definitely make it go SkyNet on all of us.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ThePyro ( 645161 )

          Can you imagine if google was a person, the kind of sanity destroying crap it would have to deal with?

          Yes, and it's pretty hilarious.

          If Google was a guy [youtube.com]

      • It's not worth arguing with them. 10 or 20 years ago being able to classify an image would have been AI to them.

        They'll be moving the goal posts long after NOT AN AI driving cars are talking them to their doctors appointments where a NOT AN AI does diagnostics on them.

        Their brains will be in a vat living on mechanically and they'll argue that it's not *true* AI.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Maritz ( 1829006 )
      It's not AI until it's Skynet? Is it a true scotsman, maybe?

      • It's not AI unless it's (A)rtificial and (I)ntelligent. You'll know when it's intelligent. Because it'll exhibit actual characteristics of intelligence. Not the ability to filter images based on content.

        But go ahead, keep calling your toaster and your thermostat intelligent. It's very amusing. Despite the fact that it's not very... intelligent.

        • The other day, my toaster called me intelligent.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fyngyrz ( 762201 )

            True story:

            A few years back, sometime overnight, a new cat I had rescued peed in my toaster.

            In the morning, dull witted and bleary eyed, I threw a couple slices of rye bread in there, and pushed down the lever. The heating elements immediately vaporized the cat urine, while altering it chemically into something that smelled so bad I could not possibly adequately describe it.

            As I reeled out of the room coughing and gagging, I actually thought I heard that toaster laughing at me.

            I think that damed burst of va

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Tablizer ( 95088 )

            The other day, my toaster called me intelligent.

            I installed Kissup 2.0 on it. It's lying to you. Nor does it make very good toast.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      There is NO formal agreed-upon definition of AI and experts, philosophers, and pundits argue forever and ever over it. Givvittup.

    • An important part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. That's what the computers are doing.

    • Re: Still Not AI (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      30% of the human brain is dedicated to the human visual system. Each eyeball has 100 million rods and cones and does basic data compression using contrast measurement of each point and its surroundings (red-hreen, blue-yellow, black-white). Add some more neurons to detect lines and points in varying directions and you have enough information to do shape recognition, motion tracking, depth perception, automatic face, text, font, object and location recognition. Get a computer to do all those and you have bio

  • 1K (Score:2)

    by Maritz ( 1829006 )
    Simply type your 1000 words and Bob's your mother's brother.
  • If would be even easier if Facebook didn't strip off any embedded info you add to images (such as your name) so that they can sell them to others. Time to watermark the sh*t out of everything.

    • It's actually a perfectly reasonable action - bizarely, for the sake of privacy. The embedded information in images can include when and where it was taken, which is information that could be used against a person.

      Facebook want to spy on you. But it is not in their interests to aid other organisations or individuals in spying on you. Not without paying Facebook for the information, anyway.

  • two girls and a cup? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    gets a hit?

    mmmm, brazile nuts and chocalate.

  • Google Photos has quietly done this for years. It's documented on their help pages:

    https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6128838?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en

    The example search is for "dogs," but it can find many more things. It's distractingly documented next to a face/person-tagging feature, but it really does do Zork-like search queries for recognized objects, or relationships among objects, within your photos.

    It's too bad Google demonstrated they couldn't be trusted to run a social

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )

      Google Photos has quietly done this for years.

      Not the same thing. Google Photos only lets you search your own images for machine guessed labels, not the images of everyone.

  • I'm already seeing people use the tag people in the photo tool to tag people who the picture merey hint at a trait in. If a picture reads "Earth girls are pretty" somebody will tag it with the profiles of some girls they think are pretty.

  • Seriously, this is news? Google and others have had this for years.

  • Intelligence, by any definition, is the ability to spot the word "unlock" in the story summary while ignoring the word "AI".

    Because we don't have "unlocks" every day, but we do have this tiresome "what the fuck is AI, anyway?" shit show more often than Popeye eats E. coli tainted spinach.

    New improved can, same old dubious irrigation method.

  • After all, deep-learning NNs have been demonstrated to be fooled very easily by this brilliant little tool [twbbs.org].
  • Thought you might want to check out the daily/weekly newsletter from CognitionX with over 4K subscribers. We covered this story and many more. We provide you with the latest and greatest news related to AI. Subscribe to stay up-to-date: http://cognitionx.com/news-bri... [cognitionx.com]

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