Facebook Says Its New AI Can Identify More Problems Faster

A recent trove of documents leaked from Facebook demonstrated how the social network struggles to moderate dangerous content in places far from Silicon Valley. Internal discussions revealed worries that moderation algorithms for the languages spoken in Pakistan and Ethiopia were insufficient, and that the company lacked adequate training data to tune systems to different dialects of Arabic. Meta Platforms, Facebook's owner, now says it has deployed a new artificial intelligence moderation system for some tasks that can be adapted to new enforcement jobs more quickly than its predecessors because it requires much less training data. The company says the system, called Few-Shot Learner, works in more than 100 languages and can operate on images as well as text. Facebook says Few-Shot Learner makes it possible to automate enforcement of a new moderation rule in about six weeks, down from around six months.