India's largest platform and marketplace for GCC & AI leaders and professionals

Sign in

India's largest platform and marketplace for GCC & AI leaders and 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

  • Transforming Customer Experience through Unified Business Functions

    Author: Souvik Das, AVP – Platforms & Offerings, Genpact Digital and Pramit Dasgupta,VP – Platforms & Offerings, Genpact Digital The recent pandemic has changed customer expectations and interactions in many ways. Forever. As organizations evolve through the new normal and gear up to satisfy their customers, there is a need to rethink and redesign how […]

  • Emerging role of Generative AI for Businesses

    Featured Article: Author: Rajan Gupta, VP & Head of Research & Analytics, Analyttica Datalab Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the way businesses operate, and Generative AI (GAI) is quickly becoming a hot topic in this field. Generative AI is the technology behind applications that can produce new content, such as images, sounds, and even text. […]

  • Future Proofing GCCs

    For a while now, India has been driving back-office functions for some of the large enterprises across the world. However, over the past few years, it has taken giant strides towards becoming the innovation hub of the world, by adding strategic value to multi-billion-dollar businesses from around the world, through Global Capability Centres (GCCs) based […]

  • Cloud Neutrality

    A multibillion-dollar, privately-owned infrastructure is now essential to the modern internet economy. That should freak you out. WE SPENT A lot of years talking about net neutrality—the idea that the companies that provide access to the internet shouldn’t unfairly block, slow down, or otherwise interfere with traffic even if that traffic competes with their services. But there’s […]