>Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Monday announced that the social network will use artificial intelligence to determine when someone has died, and stop sending those kinds of notifications.<p>Can't wait until the facebook neural net declares me dead because of my sclerotic post activity and my family thinks I've kicked the bucket when they don't get an announcenment on my birthday.<p>Maybe instead of trying to solve everything with 'artificial intelligence' we ought to design these systems in ways that are less prone to these sorts of misbehaviours. Seems like building systems that work 80% of the time and then hoping that throwing ML engineers at the issue solves the last 20% is the new hot design pattern.
Birthday reminders are one of the reasons I've practically abandoned Facebook.<p>Seeing people wish you happy birthday on there by clicking a button encapsulates how false the narrative is; if the reason you remembered my birthday is that Facebook told you then we don't have a relationship where you should be sending me a birthday message.<p>The only thing more annoying is that now LinkedIn does it too. That's just weird.
"Back in the day" I changed my birthday several times a year to see if anyone actually notices or people just push a button mindlessly.<p>I ended up having generic happy-birthday wishes by the same people over and over.
This kind of reminder can happen even if the person isn't on Facebook. Every few months, a "Hey, remember this from 5 years ago?" photo pops up with a now-deceased friend of mine. It's depressing, and my effort to get Facebook to stop showing me "Do you want to share this memory?" photos has failed. She wasn't even on Facebook. I suppose I could go through all my old photos and delete them, but I'd prefer not to be prompted at all.
AI seems to have become the default solution for any of Facebook's problems with its platform. It sounds great, but I start to wonder how practical is it. Can they really determine if you are died with high probability? You would need quite a lot of personal data from your friends and family to determine that. oh wait..
Not all memories aren't happy...<p>Like the happy memories of my ex-wife which are now a tragedy to me -- that everyday Facebook wants to remind me about. I don't use facebook much.<p>There should be a filter button such that I can say, "I don't want to hear about this person anymore."
> Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Monday announced that the social network will use artificial intelligence to determine when someone has died, and stop sending those kinds of notifications.<p>Since there is no way Facebook will get 100% recall: no, it will not stop doing that.
I’m sure whatever technical achievement solved this problem will somehow lead to people instead offering condolences on the passing of their still-living friends.