New feature could put an end to those embarrassing selfies
The world can be fairly neatly divided into two types of people: those who rarely, if ever, use Facebook; and those who use it to document pretty much every second of their entire life.
If you’re in the latter camp then you’re probably familiar with the feeling of waking up after a big night, only to slowly come round to the embarassment of a ton of half-cut selfies on your newsfeed. It’s not what you need on a hangover. Still – things are looking up, as it turns out Facebook wants to help you out.
The social media giant is working on a feature that will act like your stone-cold sober best friend. When you’ve had a couple of shandies and have decided that posting a picture of yourself wearing a traffic cone on the way to the next pub is a great idea, this feature will give you a nudge to say ‘come on now, have you really thought this through?’. Of course you might still decide to post the pic, but at least you can’t say you weren’t warned.
The somewhat improbable feature was described by head of Facebook’s artificial intelligence research lab, Yann LeCun, in an interview with Wired magazine.
Facebook already uses facial recognition on its site, enabling people to tag their friends in photos more easily. This new feature would take advantage of more powerful processes to effectively learn the difference between your sober and not-so-sober face.
Similar technology could also be used to alert you when someone you don’t know is uploading a photo of you to Facebook. Hopefully they’ll also find a way to stop our friends doing the same thing…
