Facebook was slammed for its sloppiness in handling the Christchurch mass shooting, with the social network reacting with news that it will use police body cam footage to train its AI to recognize gun attack videos.
The UK's Metropolitan Police will supply its body cam footage to Facebook for its firearms training exercises, with the social networking giant using the video to train its content moderation programs to "rapidly identify real-life first person shooter incidents and remove them from our platform".
Facebook is also talking to US police departments about acquiring their police body cam footage for similar use with AI.
The company said that the video of the Christchurch shooting didn't trip its automatic detection systems, blaming it on not having enough content "depicting first-person footage of violent events to effectively train our machine learning technology".
So guns, death, blood, screaming -- all on Facebook Live, with all of the footage it would've used (with you knowing, and not knowing) wasn't enough. But never fear, Neil Basi who is the UK's top-ranking counter terrorism police officer explains: "The technology Facebook is seeking to create could help identify firearms attacks in their early stages and potentially assist police across the world in their response to such incidents".
He added: "Technology that automatically stops live streaming of attacks once identified, would also significantly help prevent the glorification of such acts and the promotion of the toxic ideologies that drive them".
The only way this footage would help in a new event would be to have guns mounted on every building and house in the world, so that when a gun is detected anywhere (through cameras Facebook can access 24/7 on the street, and in your home/on your phone) it disables the shooter.
Other than that, by the time Facebook's AI detects what is going on -- the reaction time of the authorities is going to be the issue. What happens when someone has a toy gun or a replica of a gun, or a responsible gun owner is spotted on a FB Live video with a gun?
Facebook's AI would alert the police to an impending mass shooting, reacting to a situation that might not be out of control. Police would turn up en masse at a suspected shooter's house, and taken them down with lethal force because the AI was trained that this was an impending terrorist attack.
It feels like a very slippery slope.
