Facebook introduced its users to a new artificial intelligence that is capable of interpreting text almost as good as a human being. DeepText will scan every post and conversation from the social media website and look for the meaning behind the words.
While it sounds rather dystopic, DeepText is actually meant to create an optimized experience for Facebook users. The bot’s primary task will be to scan posts, comments, and conversations and get to know the people behind them.
Once the AI gets a little experience, it will start prompting users with suggestions. For example, when you’ll tell a friend something like “I need a ride,” DeepText will send you a Lyft pop-up, granting you the ability to call for a ride without even exiting the messenger window.
Moreover, Facebook’s new artificial intelligence will also scan posts and offer improvement solutions for making them more popular. This will help those individuals who use their account to sell an item.
“For example, someone could write a post that says, ‘I would like to sell my old bike for $200, anyone interested?’ DeepText would be able to detect that the post is about selling something, extract the meaningful information such as the object being sold and its price, and prompt the seller to use existing tools that make these transactions easier through Facebook.”
Another useful feature of DeepText will be the fact that it will sort out spams from other comments and posts. This will ultimately improve the experience of the users, and that’s what Facebook wants, to make people interested in their product, and keep them there.
The AI is still in its early stages of implementation, and it will need quite some time in order to learn how to differentiate between different intents and messages.
However, there were some voices on specialized forums that stated that DeepText is an indirect way of violating privacy even more.
Certain individuals are complaining that Facebook is marketing the “good features” of its new bot, telling people that it was only built to make their experience smoother when in reality it will actually be monitoring our every word. Their opinion is that the information will be used by the company in order to better direct other products they are marketing, making users buy more.
What do you think? Will DeepText help us have an improved Facebook experience, or is it an advanced marketing tool? Leave your opinion in the comment section, below.
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