Facebook adds artificial intelligence to its suicide prevention tools

After building up the human component of their network of suicide prevention organizations, Facebook is now bringing in the machines: The social media company announced they have updated their suicide prevention tools with artificial intelligence to identification of those at risk as well as improve the reporting process and speed up response time. On a company blog post from Vanessa Callison-Burch, Jennifer Guadagno and Antigone Davis (Facebook's Product Manager, Researcher, and Head of Global Safety, respectively) described key features of the updates, which include the integration of their prevention tools with Facebook Live and a testing phase of AI-powered pattern recognition to identify posts likely to include thoughts of suicide. "Based on feedback from experts, we are testing a streamlined reporting process using pattern recognition in posts previously reported for suicide," the company stated. "This artificial intelligence approach will make the option to report a post about'suicide or self injury' more prominent for potentially concerning posts like these." As Facebook tests that tool, employees will review posts flagged by the software and provide resources if the situation calls for it, even if no one has reported the post yet.