Meta may be using your Facebook, Instagram to 'feed the beast' of new tech

Kara Frederick, tech director at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the need for regulations on artificial intelligence as lawmakers and tech titans discuss the potential risks. Meta has acknowledged that it used public posts on its Facebook and Instagram platforms to train its new artificial intelligence virtual assistant. Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said that the company used only public posts and stayed clear of both private posts that were shared with friends and family as well as private messages to train the company's AI bot, according to a report from Reuters. "We've tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information," Clegg said during the company's annual Connect conference, adding that the "vast majority" of the data used was already publicly available. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Salt Lake City on Jan. Tech companies have been under fire in recent months over reports that they have been using information from the internet with permission to train AI models, which are capable of sorting through a massive amount of data. "AI's need staggering amounts of training data, so user posts are an ideal way to'feed the beast,'" Christopher Alexander, chief analytics officer of Pioneer Development Group, told Fox News Digital.