TBD | Hate, Lies, and AI
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Facebook’s failure to contain the spread of dangerous misinformation is no secret. For years, the company has pledged publicly to fix the problem. But in the wake of the Capitol riots, it’s clear that there’s more work to be done. So, why isn’t the social media giant using its powerful AI to contain hate and lies?
Guest:
Karen Hao, senior AI reporter at MIT Technology Review
Host
Lizzie O’Leary
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I want you to visualize something from before the pandemic. |
| 0:07.8 | Imagine Mark Zuckerberg sitting at his desk at Facebook. |
| 0:12.1 | He sort of sits in the center of his office in this giant building, and then there are all |
| 0:16.0 | these desks around him. |
| 0:17.4 | That's Karen Howe. |
| 0:18.7 | She covers artificial intelligence for the MIT Tech Review. Karen is one of the |
| 0:23.5 | best AI reporters in the country. And she wrote a story recently about AI at Facebook. Some of the |
| 0:30.0 | people she talked to for that story told her about this moment when the people working on AI got to |
| 0:35.8 | sit near Mark Zuckerberg. |
| 0:37.9 | When the AI team was there, he was like so close to the early hires of the AI team |
| 0:43.3 | that their desks were practically touching. |
| 0:45.8 | Karen sources told her that this kind of physical proximity was a window into what Zuckerberg valued at any given moment. |
| 0:53.1 | Zuckerberg really likes organizing the teams in such a way where he's always surrounded |
| 0:58.0 | closest by the teams that he cares about. |
| 1:01.1 | And when he stops caring about them, they disappear from his sight. |
| 1:06.1 | Why did Mark Zuckerberg move the AI teams to be near him? |
| 1:10.7 | What was it about AI that he was so excited about? |
| 1:15.1 | Its ability to support Facebook's growth. |
| 1:21.1 | Back in 2012, Facebook had about a billion active users. By the end of last year, that had grown to roughly 2.8 billion. |
| 1:29.4 | But the company's growth is slowing. That's why he was so excited, because he thought AI would |
| 1:34.9 | continue to drive Facebook's growth to one day have every single person in the world using Facebook. |
| 1:43.8 | What Mark Zuckerberg understood, even years ago, was how AI could help supercharge Facebook's |
... |
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