Facebook to use police bodycam footage to train AI in gun attack video

Facebook will use UK police body camera footage to train its AI to recognize gun attack videos.

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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.

Facebook to use police bodycam footage to train AI in gun attack video | TweakTown.com

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.

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NEWS SOURCE:ft.com

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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