Meta's new AI assistant trained on public Facebook and Instagram posts

By Reuters October 3, 2023 | 05:30 pm PT

A smartphone with a displayed Meta logo is placed on a computer motherboard in this illustration taken February 23, 2023. Photo by Reuters/Dado Ruvic

Meta Platforms used public Facebook and Instagram posts to train parts of its new Meta AI virtual assistant, but excluded private posts shared only with family and friends in an effort to respect consumers' privacy, the company's top policy executive told Reuters in an interview.

Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and took steps to filter private details from public datasets used for training, said Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, speaking on the sidelines of the company's annual Connect conference this week.

"We've tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information," Clegg said, adding that the "vast majority" of the data used by Meta for training was publicly available.

He cited LinkedIn as an example of a website whose content Meta deliberately chose not to use because of privacy concerns.

Clegg's comments come as tech companies including Meta, OpenAI and Alphabet's Google have been criticized for using information scraped from the internet without permission to train their AI models, which ingest massive amounts of data in order to summarize information and generate imagery.

The companies are weighing how to handle the private or copyrighted materials vacuumed up in that process that their AI systems may reproduce, while facing lawsuits from authors accusing them of infringing copyrights.

Meta AI was the most significant product among the company's first consumer-facing AI tools unveiled by CEO Mark Zuckerbergon Wednesday at Meta's annual products conference, Connect. This year's event was dominated by talk of artificial intelligence, unlike past conferences which focused on augmented and virtual reality.