Facebook plans to block drunk snaps

Facebook envisions a future in which it can detect and block its users from uploading potentially embarrassing images of themselves while on drunken nights out.

Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, who oversees Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research lab, wants to build a “digital assistant” that will recognise if you have been drinking and intervene if you are about to upload a potentially embarrassing snap.

Speaking to Wired, LeCrun explained that the digital assistant would be there to essentially tap you on the shoulder to ask, “are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”

“Imagine that you had an intelligent digital assistant which would mediate your interaction with your friends, and also with content on Facebook,” Mr LeCrun said.

Facebook is already able to recognise your face and your friends in order to easily tag them. But LeCrun’s digital assistant would take the so-called “deep learning” technology even further making it possible for the social media site to decipher between your drunken self and sober self.

The assistant could also protect users from their friends, warning users if a friend is about to upload a potentially embarrassing image of you.

Launching the AI lab last year, LeCrun said: “Facebook has created a new research laboratory with the ambitious, long-term goal of bringing about major advances in Artificial Intelligence.”

LeCrun’s digital assistant is currently in the early development stages, but its introduction onto the social networking site could one day become a reality.