Instagram Rolls Out Technology To Scan Photos For Bullying

(CBS) -- Instagram has rolled out new technology to fight bullying on the social media platform.

Sophisticated filters already help block certain Instagram comments, if you use them.

Now Instagram will use artificial intelligence to screen photos, CBS 2's Ed Curran reports.

Professor Jacob Furst at DePaul University says the algorithm is similar to using a spam filter to search for phrases and words.

"You're looking for patterns," he said. "The problem of finding patterns in images is much more complex than in text."

Once the computer learns what to look for, it can scan photos, kicking out questionable ones for humans to review.

"The most powerful kind of artificial intelligence is supervised learning and it involves humans to provide labels, so it can attempt to learn these labels," Furst said.

"A typical image may have more than one million pixels in it, each one of those pixels may have some meaning."

The goal is to use the AI filters to ensure Instagram stays free of digital bullying. The tools will be added over the next few weeks.