Meta pauses EU AI plans

Meta has been forced to put its AI training plans on hold in the UK and Europe, after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) revealed concerns over its latest plans and asked them to review and pause the training of its AI models.

Why is Meta being asked to pause its AI model training?

Last month Meta began telling its UK and European users that it had updated its privacy policy, which meant that from June 26th, it would have the right to collect their public Instagram and Facebook comments, interactions, status updates, photos, and associated captions for training its AI models. In an attempt to comply with EU legislation, they did give users an ‘opt-out’ option, but claimed they needed the data to reflect “the diverse languages, geography and cultural references of the people in Europe.”

This triggered a non-profit, advocacy group–NOYB (“None Of Your Business”)--to file 11 complaints, claiming that:

“Meta is basically saying that it can use any data from any source for any purpose and make it available to anyone in the world, as long as it’s done via AI technology…this is clearly the opposite of GDPR compliance.”

This prompted EU and UK regulators to ask Meta to delay training its large language models until it could satisfy concerns.

Meta’s decision to comply and pause its AI training plans has “pleased” European and UK regulators:

“The DPC welcomes the decision by Meta to pause its plans to train its large language model using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram across the EU/EEA,”  

“We are pleased that Meta has reflected on the concerns we shared from users of their service in the UK, and responded to our request to pause and review plans to use Facebook and Instagram user data to train generative AI”

Although Meta has promised to “continue to work collaboratively with the DPC” they have publicly announced that they’re “disappointed” with the request as they’d already informed the European Data Protection Authorities about its plans back in March, and if regulators refuse to let it use users’ information to train its models, it will only be able to deliver an inferior product.

“Put simply, without including local information we’d only be able to offer people a second-rate experience. This means we aren’t able to launch Meta AI in Europe at the moment.”