Facebook tool to save you from regret and embarrassment

Facebook is building an artificial intelligence tool that would warn people when they are about to do something they might regret later such as uploading an embarrassing photo on the social networking site.

Yann LeCun, who heads the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (Fair) lab, and his team are now laying the basic groundwork for the tool.

LeCun wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will recognise when you are uploading an embarrassing photo from a late-night party.

In a virtual way, LeCun said, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: "Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?"

"Such a tool would rely on image recognition technology that can distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self," Wired reported.

The larger aim, LeCun said, is to create things like the digital assistant that can closely analyse not only photos but all sorts of other stuff posted to Facebook.

"You need a machine to really understand content and understand people and be able to hold all that data," he said.

LeCun's Facebook lab has already developed algorithms that examine a user's overall Facebook behaviour in an effort to identify the right content for their news feed - content they are likely to click on - and they will soon analyse the text users type into status posts, automatically suggesting relevant hashtags.

LeCun and his team are also looking towards AI systems that can understand Facebook data in more complex ways.

"Imagine that you had an intelligent digital assistant which would mediate your interaction with your friends and also with content on Facebook," LeCun said.

LeCun also envisions a Facebook that instantly notifies you when someone you don't know posts your photo to the social network without your approval.