Facebook has long touted artificial intelligence technology as a solution to its many content moderation problems. The only issue is that AI first needs to be trained in order to recognize images or content that could be considered offensive, and it’s difficult to teach technology to think like a human. However, Facebook’s research team said that it has recently made a breakthrough that could allow its AI system to learn by observation. However, the AI would need to learn by scraping the data from billions of user photos.

This Facebook algorithm, called Seer, fed on data from over a billion Instagram photos to decide for itself what objects look alike. This approach, known as “self-supervised learning,” could dramatically reduce the need for humans to review content on the platform. However, it also raises obvious privacy concerns that Facebook was quick to address.

“We inform Instagram account holders in our data policy that we use the information we have to support research and innovation including in technological advancement like this,” Facebook software engineer Priya Goyal told CNBC.

Of course, just because Facebook notifies users doesn’t mean they actually understand what is being done with their data. It’s undoubtedly creepy that an AI system could be reviewing so much of our personal info — but then, that hasn’t stopped Facebook before.

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