Facebook unveiled an initiative Tuesday to take on "hateful memes" by using artificial intelligence, backed by crowd sourcing, to identify maliciously motivated posts. The leading social network said it had already created a database of 10,000 memes -- images often blended with text to deliver a specific message -- as part of a ramped-up effort against hate speech. Facebook said it was releasing the database to researchers as part of a "hateful memes challenge" to develop improved algorithms to detect hate-driven visual messages, with a prize pool of $100,000. "These efforts will spur the broader AI research community to test new methods, compare their work, and benchmark their results in order to accelerate work on detecting multimodal hate speech," Facebook said in a blog post. Facebook's effort comes as it leans more heavily on AI to filter out objectionable content during the coronavirus pandemic that has sidelined most of its human moderators.

Top experts warn against'malicious use' of AI Facebook trains artificial intelligence to spot suicidal signs Artificially intelligent algorithms to estimate Tawaf crowds at the Grand Mosque in Makkah Artificial intelligence: Leap to next development stage or job threat? SAN FRANCISCO: As debate swirls on whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or a curse for humanity, two Indian-American entrepreneur brothers are out to ensure the emerging technologies don't just benefit the richest in society. Romesh and Sunil Wadhwani this week launched what is billed as the world's first nonprofit institute dedicated to putting AI to work improving lives of poor farmers, rural health care workers or teachers in communities with scant resources. "AI will go where AI will go; it is difficult to predict where," Sunil Wadhwani said of the conflicting views on the emergence of computers more brilliant than their human creators. "Our focus is how many tens of millions of lives can we improve in the next five or 10 years. Where AI goes in 100 years, it will go."