Meta uses public Facebook and Instagram posts to train AI | Bendigo ...
Your digital subscription includes access to content from all our websites in your region. Access unlimited content and the digital versions of our print editions - Today's Paper. Text and photos posted publicly to Facebook and Instagram from as far back as 2007 are being used to train Meta's artificial intelligence models, a Parliamentary committee has heard.
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Meta's Use of Public Posts for AI Training
Representatives from Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, were pressed on their AI models during a Senate select committee hearing. Melinda Claybaugh, global privacy policy director at Meta, confirmed that unless a person had set their profile or posts to private, their social media posts were being used to train Meta's AI models.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge pressed Ms. Claybaugh on the issue. "The truth of the matter is unless you had consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided it will scrape all of the photos and all of the text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook that Australians have shared since 2007 unless there was a conscious decision to set them in private. That is actually the reality, isn't it?" he said. "Correct," Ms. Claybaugh said.
Ethical Concerns and Privacy
She attempted to continue her answer before committee chair and Labor Senator Tony Sheldon interjected, suggesting Meta's 25,000-word privacy statement did not give enough detail about how people can protect their information. "Very few people are going to spend the time actually reading it so they won't be aware that all the way back to 2007, they are having their videos, their photos, their 13-year-old daughter in a photo, then 9-year-old son, being scraped for your usage," Senator Sheldon said.
Ms. Claybaugh said she wanted to make clear Meta did not use data from accounts of people under 18 years of age to train its models. Mr. Shoebridge later pressed the issue again asking the representatives about whether there was an ethical issue to be addressed.
The Use of Copyrighted Works
When a young mother celebrated the birth of their child in 2010 and put a post up on Facebook and then celebrated their daughter's fifth-year birthday in 2015, she would never have contemplated that Meta was going to scrape those photos, scrape the text, take the name of her daughter, the photograph of her daughter and feed it into an AI model," Shoebridge said.
"Can't you see the ethical problem there?" Ms. Claybaugh said Meta had a layered approach to privacy to ensure someone's personal data is not memorised and "spit out" by the generative AI product.
