More than 600,000 people, including a host of celebrities, have fallen for a scam that claims to deny Facebook and Instagram owner Meta the right to use their images to train artificial intelligence (AI).
Movie stars James McAvoy and Ashley Tisdale, as well as former NFL player Tom Brady, all re-shared the fake “bye meta-AI” message on Instagram Stories.
The hoax claimed that by sharing the message, Meta would no longer be able to use their information.
In fact, Facebook and Instagram users can opt out of AI training in their account settings if they want to – and posting an opt-out message will have no effect.
Now, many of these messages have been labeled “false information” by Lead Stories, one of Meta’s third-party fact-checking sites.
This article seems to be in opposition to Meta June Announcement It will use public posts to train its AI models – but the company has confirmed to the BBC that the release will not have an impact on any user’s privacy settings.
“Sharing this story does not constitute an effective form of opposition,” a Meta spokesperson said.
Top Stories Determining the origin of a trend On September 1, a post was published on Facebook with slightly different wording than the version that eventually went viral.
But the trend didn’t take off until this week, when big celebrity accounts began sharing the post, with Google Trends showing a sharp increase in searches for the term “bye meta AI” after September 24.
This is not the first time that social media has been dominated by this “copy and paste” phenomenon – a term that refers to a piece of text that is frequently “copied and pasted” across the web.
Fact-checking website Snopes Several examples are covered For the past decade, users have asserted their right to privacy in public information to no avail.
But it is rare for so many high-profile accounts to be deceived.
Other social media companies have also faced criticism for their plans to train AI models on public posts, with LinkedIn this week saying it Overturn its decision Do this in the UK.
