Dubai – Masaader News
There are more than 1.9 billion users logged in to YouTube every single month who watch over a billion hours of video every day. Every minute, creators upload 300 hours of video to the platform. With this number of users, activity, and content, it makes sense for YouTube to take advantage of the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help operations. Here are a few ways YouTube, owned by Google, uses artificial intelligence today, according to Forbes.
Automatically remove objectionable content
In the first quarter of this year, 8.3 million videos were removed from YouTube, and 76% were automatically identified and flagged by artificial intelligence classifiers. More than 70% of these were identified before there were any views by users. While the algorithms are not foolproof, they are combing through content much more quickly than if humans were trying to monitor the platform singlehandedly. In some cases, the algorithm pulled down newsworthy videos mistakenly seeing them as “violent extremism.” This is just one of the reasons Google has full-time human specialists employed to work with AI to address violative content.
New effects on videos
Move over Snapchat, Google’s artificial intelligence researchers trained a neural network to be able to swap out backgrounds on videos without the need for specialized equipment. While it’s been possible to do this for decades—think green screens that are replaced by digital effects—it was a complicated and time-consuming process. The researchers trained an algorithm with carefully labeled imagery that allowed the algorithm to learn patterns, and the result is a fast system that can keep up with video.
“Up Next” feature
If you have ever used YouTube’s “Up Next” feature, you benefited from the platform’s artificial intelligence. Since the dataset on YouTube is constantly changing as its users upload hours of video every minute, the AI required to power its recommendation engine needed to be different than the recommendation engines of Netflix or Spotify. It had to be able to handle real-time recommendations while new data is constantly added by users. The solution they came up with is a two-part system. The first is candidate generation, where the algorithm assesses the YouTube history of the user. The second part is the ranking system that assigns a score to each video.
Training on depth prediction
With so much data, YouTube videos provide a fertile training ground for artificial intelligence algorithms. Google AI researchers used more than 2,000 “mannequin challenge” videos posted on the platform to create an AI model with the ability to discern the depth of field in videos. The “mannequin challenge” had groups of people in a video stand still as if frozen while one person goes through the scene shooting the video. Ultimately, this skill of depth prediction could help propel the development of augmented reality experiences.
With the continuing crisis of mass shootings plaguing America, President Trump requested that social media companies, “develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.” With the assistance of artificial intelligence, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook already work to delete terrorist content, but what’s new in the President’s request is that they work with the Department of Justice and law enforcement agencies. There are many questions about how such a partnership would work, if social media channels could detect actual terrorists before they act and the potential to impact the civil liberties of innocent people. Whether YouTube and other social media companies could use artificial intelligence to stop terrorists while not infringing on the rights of others remains to be seen.