Last week, like the Jews of Exodus painting blood on their lintels, hundreds of thousands of Instagram users posted a block of text to their accounts

How to Opt Out of A.I. Online

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-03 21:30:08

Last week, like the Jews of Exodus painting blood on their lintels, hundreds of thousands of Instagram users posted a block of text to their accounts hoping to avoid the plague of artificial intelligence online. “Goodbye Meta AI,” the message began, referring to Facebook’s parent company, and continued, “I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information or photos.” Friends of mine posted it; artists I follow posted it; Tom Brady posted it. In their eagerness to combat the encroachment of A.I., all of them seemed to overlook the fact that merely sharing a meme would do nothing to change their legal rights vis-à-vis Meta or any other tech platform.

It is, in fact, possible to prevent Meta from training its A.I. models on your personal data. In the United States, there is no law giving users the right to protect their public posts against A.I., but you can set your Instagram account to private, which will prevent models from scraping your data. (Users in the United Kingdom and European Union, which have stronger data regulation, can also file a “right to object” to A.I. form through Meta’s account settings.) Going private presents a dilemma, though: Are you willing to limit the reach of your profile just to avoid participating in the new technology? Other platforms have more targeted data preferences buried in their settings menus. On X, you can click Privacy, then Data sharing and personalization: there you’ll find a permission checkbox that you can uncheck to stop X’s Grok A.I. model from using your account data “for training and fine-tuning,” as well as an option to clear past personal data that may have been used before you opted out. LinkedIn includes an opt-out button in its data privacy settings. In general, though, digital platforms are using the content we’ve uploaded over the years as raw material for the rapid development of A.I. tools, so it’s in their best interests not to make it too convenient for us to cut them off.

Even if your data isn’t going to train artificial intelligence, you will be peppered more and more frequently with invitations to use A.I. tools. Google search now often puts A.I. answers above Web site results. Google Chrome, Facebook, and Instagram prompt us to use A.I. to create images or write messages. The newest iPhone models incorporate generative A.I. that can, among other things, summarize the contents of your text threads. Meta recently announced that it is testing a new feature that will add personalized A.I.-generated imagery directly into users’ feeds—say, for example, your likeness rendered as a video-game character. (According to the company, this feature will require you to opt in.) Mark Zuckerberg recently told Alex Heath of The Verge that such content represented a “logical jump” for social media, but added, “How big it gets is kind of dependent on the execution and how good it is.” As of yet, all these A.I. experiences are still nascent features in search of fans, and the investment in A.I. is vastly greater than the organic demand for it appears to be. (OpenAI expects 3.7 billion dollars in revenue this year, but five billion dollars in gross losses.) Tech companies are building the cart without knowing whether the horse exists, which may account for some users having feelings of paranoia. Who asked for this, and to what end? The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms.