Meta tests facial recognition to fight celebrity scams [Video]

The days of Tom Hanks having to issue Instagram warnings about fake AI videos of himself may hopefully be coming to an end.

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is now working on facial recognition techniques to try and curb the rise in “celeb-bait scams”, as well as help users recover their accounts quicker.

“We’re testing a new way of detecting celeb-bait scams,” wrote Meta in a blog published on Monday. “If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures. If we confirm a match and determine the ad is a scam, we’ll block it. We immediately delete any facial data generated from ads for this one-time comparison, regardless of whether our system finds a match, and we don’t use it for any other …