Meta is using your Instagram and Facebook photos to train its AI models
Big Tech firms are scrambling for AI training data and Meta seems to have one big advantage over its rivals: using Instagram and Facebook photos.
Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, told Bloomberg's Tech Summit on Thursday that it uses publicly available photos and text from the platforms to train its text-to-image generator model called Emu.
"We don't train on private stuff, we don't train on stuff that people share with their friends, we do train on things that are public," he said.
Meta's text-to-image model can produce "really amazing quality images" because Instagram has many photos of "art, fashion, culture and also just images of people and us," Cox added.
Users can create images on Meta AI by typing a prompt starting with the word "imagine," and it will generate four images, according to its website.
AI models need to be fed and trained on data for them to be effective. It's been a contentious issue as there's almost no way to prevent copyrighted content from being scraped from the internet and used to create an LLM.
