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Heyyy, you seem to be trying to post a drunk picture You know your boss looks at this?

Facebook mulls assistant for the tired and confused

Facebook engineers are building a virtual assistant that might one day warn inebriated netizens against uploading embarrassing photos on the free-content ads platform.

The company's one-year-old Artificial Intelligence research lab has been working on the project, according to WiReD magazine.

Facebook's Yann LeCun, who leads the AI team, said that such a digital assistant could say to a user of the site: "Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?"*

As noted by WiReD, such a nagging tool would be built using image recognition tech alongside deep learning techniques.

Creepily, the same team isn't just working on weak states of mind such as drunkenness. The AI engineers hope to soon be able to implement tech that taps into the text typed in Facebook posts, too.

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

But, as we've previously seen here in Europe, people have been deeply twitchy about Facebook's efforts to use facial recognition tech to automatically identify individuals on the behavioural network. In fact, such a method has been barred in the EU. So can Facebook really convince Europeans to embrace an AI service that spots when we've had too much booze? ®

*Seriously, though, who in their right mind would allow their manager and mum to befriend them on Facebook? Somebody pass the special, vomit-inducing, Christmas bottle of Cherry Brandy now, pleeeease?!

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