Hundreds of thousands of people have fallen for a hoax that claims to deny Meta the right to use their photos for training the company’s AI.
Since early September, social media users have been sharing the same post about wanting to protect their data and photos from being used by Meta AI.
The message, which is most often shared on Instagram Stories, falsely claims that whoever shares the post can legally bar Meta from using their data and photos.
However, in reality, the viral post does not protect people or their images from the parent company of Instagram, Threads, and Facebook.
‘Goodbye Meta AI’
The post, which features black-and-white text, begins with the words “Goodbye Meta AI.”
The message continues, claiming that based on advice from an unnamed lawyer, Meta is not authorized to use the individual’s data or images because they shared this post.
“If you do not post at least once it will be assumed you are okay with them using your information and photos,” the post reads.
“I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information, or photos.”
However, this statement has no legal validity. Sharing it won’t protect a person, their data, or their photos.
Many of these posts have now been labeled as “false information” and users are directed to a report on Lead Stories, one of Meta’s third-party fact-checking sites.
“Does posting a statement ensure that users of Meta services will not have their data used in Meta’s artificial intelligence training? No, that’s not true,” Lead Stories says.
The third-party fact-checking site says that the viral post is “an example of ‘copypasta,’ text containing information that’s often not true but which is repeatedly copied and pasted online.”
How to Opt Out of Meta AI
Instead, Facebook and Instagram users can opt out of Meta AI training by setting their account to private.
For Meta users in the U.S., there isn’t a way to stop Meta AI from learning from public social media posts, as there are no privacy laws specific to this.
Back in February, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made clear that he is using images posted on Facebook and Instagram to train the company’s generative AI tools with.
“When people think about data, they typically think about the corpus that you might use to train a model up front,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings call.
“On Facebook and Instagram, there are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos, which we estimate is greater than the Common Crawl dataset and people share large numbers of public text posts in comments across our services as well.”
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