Facebook Is Using Your Instagram Photos To Teach Its AI

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Facebook uses your public Instagram posts, along with their accompanying hashtags, to teach its AI to be smarter when looking at photos.

Facebook is teaching its AI to be smarter when it comes to image recognition. And it has discovered that your public Instagram posts could be a very helpful resource. Image recognition programs are taught using millions of manually-tagged photos in order to teach them what to find in an image. Well, guess what, when adding hashtags to your Instagram posts, you’re doing half the job for them.

When adding relevant hashtags to your Instagram posts, you’re helping Facebook improve its image recognition software.

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We all use hashtags to gain more organic reach, often trying to describe what the image actually contains. The problem is that the hashtags we add to our Instagram posts aren’t always directly related to the image itself. Therefore, Facebook’s engineers had to sort through hashtags first, labelling some – like #tbt or #like4like – as “incoherent label noise.” The engineers then went on building an AI designed to sort and supervise the hashtags, hence creating an AI that is essentially helping teach another AI.

But it works. By using hashtags to predict what was in over 1 billion Instagram photos, the system ended up with an 85.4% accuracy rate – a rate that was actually 2% higher than what other image-recognition models had provided.

By using Instagram photos and their accompanying hashtags, Facebook was able to improve its accuracy rate by 2%.

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Facebook said it will continue using public Instagram posts and their accompanying hashtags to further improve its image recognition software. Now, you have a choice: you can either help Facebook by using only relevant hashtags, or freak out and turn your Instagram account to private.