To Combat Rogue AI, Facebook Pitches 'Radioactive Data'

Facebook scientists have proposed using watermarks to identify when online images get used to train neural networks. The proposal appears to be aimed at least in part at the rise of big data startups, such as Clearview AI, that are scraping publicly available photographs from social networks and other sites and using them for facial recognition purposes, prompting privacy concerns (see: Facial Recognition: Big Trouble With Big Data Biometrics). Neural networks are a type of machine learning that involves using a large set of training data to devise rules that can be used to identify future patterns (see: What's Artificial Intelligence? To detect if training sets have used Facebook images, a team of the company's researchers has proposed building a system that can be used to find out. "We have developed a new technique to mark the images in a data set so that researchers can determine whether a particular machine learning model has been trained using those images," say Facebook researchers Alexandre Sablayrolles, Matthijs Douze and Hervé Jégou in a blog post.