India's largest platform and marketplace for GCCs, AI & Analytics leaders & professionals

Sign in

India's largest platform and marketplace for GCCs, AI & Analytics leaders & professionals
Become a Thought Leader
Become a 3AI Member

Sign in

3AI Digital Library

< Go Back

Facebook is testing an AI-powered tool to Summarize News

3AI January 2, 2021

Facebook has been trying to get a foothold in the news space for many years. Last year, the company launched a dedicated section on its site called Facebook News for users in the US. It also wants to expand this program to other countries such as Brazil, Germany, and India.

According to a report from BuzzFeed News, Facebook is testing an AI-powered tool called TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) to summarize news pieces, so you don’t even have to click through to read those articles.

The report noted that the company showed off this tool in an internal meeting last night. It’s also planning to add features such as voice narration and an assistant to answer queries about an article.

At the outset, this seems like a great idea — getting a short summary of an article you don’t have time to read, right. There are already some similar tools such as the AutoTLDR bot on Reddit. However, given Facebook‘s sketchy history with news and publishers, there are many ways this could go wrong.

At best, the AI makes silly mistakes in parsing the article content, so you can’t make sense of the summary it spits out. After all, We’ve seen many incidents where bots picked out problematic portions of content from their training algorithms and spewed racist gibberish.

At worst, there’s potential to create or distribute misinformation. There are a ton of news sources on Facebook that are not known for their accuracy. If a skewed summary of those articles starts floating around, it might create more trouble.

Facebook will also need to train its algorithm to avoid taking quotes or sentences from articles out of context. A seemingly non-problematic summary could be contradicting the article or the subject and vice versa.

In the past, researchers have successfully tricked AI systems that are designed to detect toxic comments on the internet with ‘positive’ words. If the people behind propaganda operations could crack Facebook’s algorithm for summarizing articles, they could write stories in such a way that the summaries include the messages they want to spread.

Many reports have pointed out the social network’s massive misinformation problem, and a lot of it was because of poorly designed software. While Facebook’s TL;DR product is not public yet, it already sounds like it could be a disaster.

Picture from freepik.com

    3AI Trending Articles

  • RBI provides new set of guidelines for the Digital Banking and Payments ecosystem

    The master direction on digital payment security controls, released last week, casts a wide net. The skyrocketing of online transactions in the country—Covid-19 has provided no small impetus, with the amount transacted via UPI doubling in January 2021, at Rs 4.3 lakh crore, from lasts year’s Rs 2.1 lakh crore—calls for fortifying cybersecurity in the […]

  • Reimagine and Redefine the Enterprise of the Future with Generative AI Technologies

    Featured Article: Author: Jayachandran Ramachandran, Senior Vice President – Artificial Intelligence Labs Course5 Intelligence There are multiple inflection points in the history of the computation industry since the invention of computers in 1945. Some of the seminal moments are the advent of mainframe technology, personal computing, graphical user interface, Internet, mobile tech, cloud tech, artificial […]

  • Global retailers expand digital channels as pandemic hits physical stores

    The pandemic dealt a mighty blow to physical retail, forcing global retailers to look at significantly strengthening their digital channels. India is emerging as a big beneficiary of all the technology work this entails. US retailer Target is nearly doubling its headcount in Bengaluru to over 6,000. It has leased fresh space of 2.8 lakh […]

  • Transforming Product Experience: How Generative AI is changing the game for Microsoft, Oracle, and AWS

    Featured Article: Author: Abhishek Tandon, Director, Customer Success for Fosfor, LTIMindtree Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the way we interact with technology, and one of its most intriguing applications is conversational AI. Chatbots and virtual assistants have become increasingly popular, enabling businesses to provide personalized and efficient customer experiences. Companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon […]