Inside Facebook, Twitter and Google’s AI battle over your social lives.
When you sign up for Facebook on your phone, the app isn’t just giving you the latest updates and photos from your friends and family. In the background, it’s utilizing the phone’s gyroscope to detect subtle movements that come from breathing. It’s measuring how quickly you tap on the screen, and even looking at what angle the phone is being held.
Sound creepy? These are just some of the ways that Facebook is verifying that you’re actually human and not one of the tens of millions of bots attempting to invade the social network each day.
That Facebook would go to such lengths underscores the escalation of the war between tech companies and bots that can cause chaos in politics and damage public trust. Facebook isn’t alone. Twitter on Wednesday began removing millions of blocked accounts, and Google is looking to stamp out malicious trolls on YouTube.
The road to salvation, they believe, is paved with artificial intelligence. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly pointed to AI as a solution to his social network’s flaws during his testimony before Congress and again at the company’s F8 developers conference. Google wants to be an AI-first company and Twitter likewise wants to use the technology to stamp out trolls.
“It is already pretty much a fundamental part of everyday life,” Michael Connor, the executive director of Open MIC, a technology policy nonprofit, said. “AI is becoming part of the way we listen to music, how we handle our medical issues, and how we drive our cars.”