Netizens can ask Meta, the home of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, not to train its generative AI models on some of their personal data.
Like all businesses developing AI systems capable of generating text, images and more, the social media giant scrapes the internet for content to teach various models. People can now ask Meta to remove some of their personal information from that training data through this online form, if they’re eligible, so it doesn’t get ingested by these models.
“Depending on where people live, they can exercise their data subject rights and object to certain data being used to train our AI models. They can submit an objection form to us via the Privacy Center link,” a Meta spokesperson said. Register on thursday.
That form can be used to ask Meta to delete, inspect, or edit third-party-sourced information about you that can be fed into the neural network to train it.
For example, a person’s name, their job details, or contact information described in a public blog post can be swept into data scraped by meta for training, data that the model can later return to other people. If you don’t want this information to be used to train Mega-Corp’s generative AI models, you can ask for it to be deleted.
Unfortunately, the new policy only covers third-party sources and does not extend to any personal data uploaded to Meta’s social media platforms. In other words, Meta can use the text contained in posts or comments, or selfies and photos submitted by users to Facebook or Instagram, to train its AI models. People have a little more control over data coming from outside the Meta Empire.
“Because such a large amount of data is required to train effective models, a combination of sources is used for training. These sources include information publicly available online and licensed information, as well as information from Meta’s products and services,” the veteran policy document said.
“When we collect public information from the Internet or license data from other providers to train our models, it may include personal information. For example, if we collect public blog posts it may include the author’s name and contact information. When we receive this public and As personal information is part of the licensed data that we use to train our models, we do not link this data to any meta account.”
However, a spokesperson told us that Biz did not train its latest big language model, Llama 2, on any user data “public or otherwise.”
Eggheads at the Facebook titan have developed numerous generative AI models capable of generating text, images, code and music. Meta top boss Mark Zuckerberg believes the technology is key to creating his vision of the Metaverse, where users can socialize and work in virtual reality worlds. In the short term, Meta is also developing generative AI tools for advertising, and in the near future is using the technology to develop things like chatbots and customizable stickers for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. ®