Social media giant Meta said Wednesday that user interactions with its AI assistant will soon help generate ads and other social media content for profiles on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The company said its millions of social media users will begin getting change notifications on October 7 and its new recommendation system update will be effective December 16.
“Whether it’s a voice chat or a text exchange with our AI features, this update will help us improve the recommendations we provide for people across our platforms so they’re more likely to see content they’re actually interested in — and less of the content they’re not,” Meta officials announced in a release.
But it added users will be able to “continue to adjust the content and ads you’re seeing at any time” with its Ads Preferences and other built-in feed control.
In May, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Meta’s AI digital assistant reached 1 billion active monthly users.
Zuckerberg said at the time there will be “opportunities to either insert paid recommendations” or offer social media users a “subscription service so that people can pay to use more compute.”
On Wednesday, a Meta company official claimed its users already assumed that Facebook was utilizing AI interactions as part of its ad targeting model.
“While this is a natural progression of our personalisation efforts and will help give us even better recommendations for people, we want to be super transparent about it and provide a heads up before we actually begin using this data in a new way, even if people already thought that we were doing this,” according to Christy Harris, Meta’s privacy and data policy manager.
Harris said that whether a person is using a keyboard to type an interaction or using the audio version of an interaction, “those signals will still be used,” she said during a media call.
However, Harris added the update will not use its WhatsApp messaging feature as part of the changes.
According to Harris, opting out of the recommendation update is not optional. But it “won’t apply to them” if a user does not interact with Meta AI.
Harris continued that Meta will rollout its new update to users in Britain and European Union following “our usual regulatory updates.”
Meta’s Wednesday announcement followed its revelation that Meta will partner with the US General Services Administration to grant the federal government access to its Llama open source AI models. (UPI)
