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Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
91–100 of 160 posts
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#92> Over the past month of testing, Facebook has initiated more than 100 “wellness checks” with first-responders visiting affected users. “There have been cases where the first-responder has arrived and the person is still broadcasting.”
It's important to note here that "first-responder" here means police; because suicide tends to either be a crime, or something for which police can legally take you into custody for. Regardless of what you think of this, any intellectually honest discussion of this must acknowledge that this machine SWATs people.
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#93This 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.
Sounds like the old 'break their windows by night, fix em by day' trick
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#94It's impressive how much low-hanging fruit exists here…
I recall interning at Google in 2012, and asking about the suicide-information Onebox. It matched obvious search queries like "I want to kill myself" and provided data about suicide help lines in a non-invasive way. Unfortunately, it used a fairly strict string matching algo, so while "how to kill yourself" would trigger it, it wouldn't pick up things like "how to kill myself". It was also only localised to the US at the time, and didn't have hotline data for other countries.
… it turned out there was already a larger dataset, internationalised, that was ready to be imported into the search engine. But the onebox team was busy with the 2012 Olympics…
Technically, interns didn't get 20% time, but my mentor understood it was important and told me to go for it.
One of those things where you don't collect metrics to validate your assumptions, but just know it saved lives…
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely not. HIPAA regulates the medical and insurance industries, which Facebook is certainly not. If you broadcast medical data to the public or put it in a newspaper HIPAA does not apply, much like this case. Best case scenario, and this is still a stretch, is that Facebook could be guilty of slander if they describe you has suicidal and that description becomes known to a third party without your consent.
I think it is unclear. For example Apple has HealthKit which collects health related data.. That data is probably HIPAA protected. If it's not (and if Facebook is not) then I would imagine we will see legislation and/or lawsuits to clarify things.
Apple is not a covered entity under HIPAA[0], and thus has no liability for the data it collects.
"If an entity does not meet the definition of a covered entity or business associate, it does not have to comply with the HIPAA Rules."
[0] - https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities...
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#96This is an unbelievably slippery slope. It has the potential for great good, but also for great harm. Cliched and click-bait phrases, but I believe they are accurate in this instance. I'll try to explain why I believe that. A case has been made that Facebook users are not the customers, they are the product, and that data purchasers and advertisers are the customers. If Facebook can determine whether you are suicidal…
> Take this to the absurd extreme and consider how it compares to the Pre-Crime operations depicted in the movie Minority Report. Instead of Oracles we have Machine Learning intelligent software agents. Most of the problems depicted in the movie could arise.
This is the first thing I thought of.
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#97There'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…
Facebook doesn't have the moral legitimacy to take on this task. No for-profit tech company should be diagnosing or reporting mental illness.
Regardless, aren't there laws against such things? Wouldn't HIPAA be relevant here?
I do understand the desire to address these troubling issues. I would argue these are symptoms of underlying issues that are better addressed at a deeper level. I'm thinking of the fractured and isolated nature of living in many modern cities, increased loneliness, huge overload of low quality, addictive information, inability to unplug from our devices and be mindful of our current experience, false sense of connectedness found in social media, etc.
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#98Please permit me to play the pessimistic man on the street: If Facebook can deploy AI to detect the early signs of suicide, why can't they deploy AI to detect "fake news" or those susceptible to "fake news"?
Furthermore, "cui bono" (for whose benefit [0])? What does Facebook gain from being able perform this sort of detection given it is a for-profit corporation and not a non-profit philanthropic organization?
An aside: I wonder if there will be accounts of similar to Dante's Inferno [1], or Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness [2] about today's corporations in the future some day.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#99This 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…
I'm worried there's a taboo developing where only professionals or mentally ill people themselves are allowed to express any kind of opinion about mental illness or the mentally ill.
Well, let's be real you can hardly criticize someone without pathologizing it.
In the 1970s, people were worried about kids reading comic books and garbage novels.
In the 1980s-1990s, people were worried about kids playing too many video games or watching too much tv.
Now we're worried about internet addiction as though kids get itchy and cold without their fix. We can't just say "don't spend 8 hours/day watching TV. Go outside" - we have to use the language of healthcare.
Re: Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide
#100This 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…
> Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users with mental illnesses
Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.
Most of us accept some level of State interference in our lives for our own good. Maybe we are going to have to have that discussion about involuntary interventions by corporations, too.