Comment Is this technologically feasible? (Score 1) 134
Facebook is doing some interesting research. Is it even possible to determine, from a picture, if someone is drunk? Do you start with face recognition algorithms, and look at the face? Can the algorithm learn body language? I am skeptical on this.
Fashioning such a tool is largely about building image recognition technology that can distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self, and using a red-hot form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning”—a technology bootstrapped by LeCun and other academics—Facebook has already reached a point where it can identify your face and your friends’ faces in the photos you post to its social network, letting you more easily tag them with the right names.
Identifying one's face is not barely even AI any more. The fingerprint is based on the distance between the facial features. Yes, neural networks and things are good at finding those features, so AI is involved to some degree. Identifying some vague concept like drunkenness based on a facial recognition algorithm seems like a big step. I'll be impressed if they can do this with any reliability. I bet you could do better looking at the GPS coordinates of the picture, proximity to bars, the people in the picture, and the time of day. Maybe that is more like what they are doing, than actually judging the image itself.
P.S. This is supposed to be a tech blog. How sad is it that a story about deep learning AI yields nothing but a series of jokes about drunkenness?