'GrokNet', the AI behind Facebook Shops, looks for body type, skin tone, location, socioeconomic class in photos

Yay, Clearview AI but for shopping!

Facebook Mark Zuckerberg today announced the launch of Facebook Shops, an e-commerce feature to allows business users to list and sell products on Facebook and Instagram.

Here's the Facebook blog post launching the new shop feature.

Today we're introducing Facebook Shops, which will make it easy for businesses to set up a single online store on both @facebookapp and @instagram, and soon @messenger and @WhatsApp too pic.twitter.com/bBloRGBFzP

— Facebook (@Facebook) May 19, 2020

Here's more at CNBC about Facebook Shops.

Separately, Kyle Wiggers at VentureBeat reports on some of the very creepy personal details examined for the shopping experience by Facebook's artificial intelligence:

Facebook says its AI-powered shopping systems segment, detect, and classify images to know where products appear and deliver shopping suggestions. One of those systems GrokNet was trained on seven data sets containing images of products that millions of users post, buy, and sell in dozens of categories, ranging from SUVs to stiletto heels to side tables. Another creates 3D views from 2D videos of products, even those obscured by dim or overly bright lighting, while a third spotlights apparel like scarfs, ties, and more that might be partially obscured by their surroundings.

Facebook says that GrokNet, which can detect exact, similar (via related attributes), and co-occurring products across billions of photos, performs searches and filtering on Marketplace at least twice as accurately than the algorithm it replaced. For instance, its able to identify 90% of home and garden listings compared with Facebooks text-based attribution systems, which can only identify 33%.