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Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

#81

Post by DashRattlesnake »

dominotw wrote: post #11
mtgx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming it will be anywhere close to accurate. Knowing Facebook's previous attempts at AI, I wouldn't expect much. I wonder what the false positive rate will be. "Dave, you should stop thinking about killing yourself!" - "But...I wasn't thinking about killing myself?!" "Come on, Dave, deep down you know you want to. You can't fool me! I know everything about you." "- Well, now that I think about it, watching…

>Knowing Facebook's previous attempts at AI Curious what these were.

The content of "places" feature looks like it's managed by a machine learning algorithm, and it appears to be a disaster (from a user perspective). It incorrectly merges and proposes bizarre categories all the time.

There was an bad issue with a place I cared enough about to try to correct, so I ventured into the "community" they setup to build their training set to try to get it fixed. It was such a depressing place. Hundreds of people tricked by gamification into working for free for a for-profit company, only to be frustrated and have their efforts shit upon by its half-ass algorithm.

Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

#83

Post by freedomben »

I recognize that this will not be a popular thing to ask, especially to people who have been affected personally by the suicide of a loved one (I have and it hurts, RIP Braden), but do people not have a right to their own life? Do they not own their bodies, which as much as it sucks, includes the right to destroy it? If somebody really wants out, is it ethical for us to trap them inside?

Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

#84

Post by freedomben »

Shank wrote: post #78

There's a lot of pessimism in the comments. I believe this is one of the best uses for an AI that we've come up with. First, let's go into the details: 1. They only monitor and elevate to moderators content from posts and Facebook live. 2. Moderators can then take action, and reports from this system are prioritized over other non-pressing issues. The actual life saving chances of this system are huge. Just from a pu…

In general I agree with you. However I do worry about unintended consequences.

For example, if someone knows that Facebook AI is looking for this, and they don't want their attempt thwarted, they may actually hide signs that might otherwise have been present and been opportunities.

I have had friends commit suicide and it is absolutely devastating. I completely understand the desire to "do something." But one of my friends actually Googled, "signs of suicide" and then made sure not to give any of those signs, because he did not want to be stopped.

Everybody is so different, so it's difficult to analyze the trade offs. But it is something I think about.

Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

#85

Post by austincheney »

bdod6 wrote: post #71
austincheney wrote: post #47

I so wish people would stop abusing the term AI . This is an application that employs heuristics upon scanned data and then executes events. By that definition half of everything written in JavaScript is AI.

They are using AI for natural language processing though. Heuristics would be if they just scanned a post for keywords or waiting for a suicide reporting. The article suggests they are using reporting as labeled training data, and eventually they'll be able to detect posts/videos that indicate suicide. I agree that AI term gets thrown around a lot these days but don't think that's what is happening here.

> They are using AI for natural language processing though

I am not sure how that, by itself, qualifies as AI. It is a dedicated NLP application doing the one job it was designed to do. In my idea of AI, the machine would have to learn from prior mistakes without the developers doing that learning for it.

Also, for what its worth, in the real world to qualify suicidal thoughts you have to ask a person directly if they have any thoughts of harming themselves or others while aggressively watching their body language to force a more honest response during emotional pressure. Scanning user submitted text would not qualify as suicidal behavior until the user mentions self-harm.

Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

#86

Post by [deleted] »

freedomben wrote: post #83

I recognize that this will not be a popular thing to ask, especially to people who have been affected personally by the suicide of a loved one (I have and it hurts, RIP Braden), but do people not have a right to their own life? Do they not own their bodies, which as much as it sucks, includes the right to destroy it? If somebody really wants out, is it ethical for us to trap them inside?

[deleted]

Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

#89

Post by skiman10 »

jimmytucson wrote: post #20

Wonderful example of how we can use AI for good. Now, if this catches on, I can see Facebook adapting their algorithm to recommend treatments for depression, anxiety, even ADHD. This would be a huge success. "Mr. Smith, I see Facebook's AI considers you a strong candidate for medication X and your doctor agrees. Can you explain then why you haven't been taking medication X?" Also, if an algorithm can detect when a pe…

This commit really reminds me of the anime "Psycho-Pass". They use an algorithm to detect criminals and stop them when their "score" goes above a certain threshold. Really interesting concept.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/13601/Psycho-Pass

Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

#90

Post by rdtsc »

asdgkknio wrote: post #15

This may or may not be a useful technology, but the fact that Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users with mental illnesses is disturbing. They have more information about their users than psychologists have about their patients. They can (and do) build a psychological profile and diagnose mental illness. Yet rather than keeping this information in the closest confidence, they sell…

Even more, we've seen articles which pointed out how using Facebook makes people more depressed and doesn't help with isolation, and loneliness. So in a terribly ironic way, Facebook is making them depressed, but then it doesn't want to them to die because there's nobody left to lick the "Like" button, so it deploys AI doctors to diagnose and prevent suicide from happening.
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