Meta to use AI to stop nude pictures being sent on Instagram

Meta has revealed its working on an artificial intelligence that will be used to stop unsolicited nude photos being sent on Instagram.

A Meta Platforms spokesperson confirmed to The Verge, following the discovery of a new privacy protection feature that's currently under development at the company. The new feature is called "nudity protection" and is an optional feature that, when enabled, will cover photos in chats that may contain nudity until the user chooses to view them.

Meta states that the new feature is currently in the early stages of development but, when complete, will grant Instagram users a layer of protection against unwanted nude imagery and messages being sent to recipients. Notably, Meta has said that the new technology won't allow Instagram to access users' messages between accounts or share the information with third-party companies, but the artificial intelligence being created for the feature will be designed to sift through messages to determine the severity of the content.

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The news of this new Instagram features comes after a report was published by The Pew Research Center that found 33% of women under the age of 35 experienced sexual assault online. Furthermore, The Verge reports that the United Kingdom may soon be making cyberflashing a criminal offense, which is the process of sending unwanted sexual messages to strangers.

Notably, Texas has already made cyberflashing a misdemeanor in 2019, but largely across the United States, there is no law in place to state its a crime despite some experts in applicable fields warning that cyberflashing can be as damaging to the receiver as sexual abuse comments in person.

In other news, the hacking collective called Anonymous has claimed responsibility for the attack on Iranian government websites, including the hack of the website of the Central Bank of Iran. Additionally, the hacking collective has also claimed it has hacked the Iranian Teachers' Savings Fund, and once it successfully entered the database, it sent out an email to all members inviting them to protest.

• Read more: Anonymous claims it has hacked the Iranian government

NASA has also successfully collided its DART spacecraft in an asteroid located millions of miles from Earth, in a historic mission that marks the very first planetary defense mission conducted in the name of protecting Earth.

• Read more: NASA's DART spacecraft hits asteroid, video released of final moments