Facebook: Virtual Assistant Coming to Prevent Faux Pas

Facebook’s staff is always working to offer new features to its users, and today a promising innovation is emerging that could appear in the coming months. Indeed, it is learned that a division of the social network is working on creating a virtual assistant that can come to the aid of users. The “Facebook AI Research Lab” – the name of this specific division – is developing software that, by analyzing images and texts, will be able to “understand” the subject matter before publication. In this way, Facebook’s virtual assistant can warn the social network user if the photo to be uploaded or the phrase to be shared is deemed “inappropriate.” The goal is therefore to encourage people to reflect on how they share their experiences, so as to weigh whether or not it is appropriate to do so. All this has been designed to ensure that users do not regret – in the future – what they have published.

The project was broadly outlined by Yann LeCun, a researcher at New York University who heads the project within the Facebook AI Research Lab. However, the time is not yet ripe to definitively state when the virtual assistant will actually become operational. Certainly, the project is very interesting and expectations are decidedly high; however, the perception that subscribers will have of such a novelty remains to be evaluated. Will the virtual assistant be perceived as a wise “guardian angel” or rather as a censor, or more precisely as a sort of moralizer?