Facebook will use images from police bodycams to train AI to recognize shooting images so that they can be kept off the platform. Only training images are used.
Facebook will collaborate with police forces from the United States and the United Kingdom for this. It concerns bodycam images that are made during firearms training of the officers and special police units, and therefore not about possible firearms violence that the police may have to deal with in real life.
According to the Financial Times, Facebook will provide the bodycams to the police for free, with the social media company allowed to use the data in return. Britain’s Metropolitan Police reports that it will share the images with Facebook from October and that the images will also be sent to the UK’s Home Office Ministry so that they can be shared with other tech companies as well.
Facebook says this initiative to train artificial intelligence using police bodycam images is an important step in improving its detection methods. The company also points to the infamous video of the New Zealand terrorist who shot 51 people in Christchurch and livestreamed a first-person video of it on Facebook.
According to Facebook, the automatic detection systems did not pick this video because it says it has insufficient first-person images of violent actions to adequately train the machine learning technology. Facebook received quite a bit of criticism, because those images were not picked out and remained on the platform for a relatively long time. In response, the company previously introduced a number of additional restrictions on live streaming.