Facebook lets its AI sniff through your gallery if you want it to

Meta has launched a new button within Facebook in the US and Canada . This button lets you use AI to browse your photo gallery. The idea is that the AI ​​will then tell you which photos are worth sharing. This means you’re giving Meta AI access to your entire photo gallery on your phone (not what you’ve already shared on Facebook).

AI going through your photo gallery

It’s clearly a feature that’s not enabled by default: you can indicate that you’re okay with it, and then the AI ​​can browse your gallery when you press the button. The AI ​​searches for attractive photos among your screenshots and random photos. It then recommends a few, and you can save those photos for later or share them immediately, complete with any visual adjustments the AI ​​suggests.

Keep in mind that this feature puts your photos in Meta’s cloud, as we now know that Meta—unless you object—may use all your posted photos for AI training. Meta stated during testing of this new feature that it doesn’t use your unpublished photos to train its AI. However, it’s unclear whether that also applies to this feature now that it’s released. It almost has to be that it doesn’t train its AI with it, because then few people would dare use the feature. But it’s not 100% clear at the time of writing.

We don’t know for sure

Meta told TheVerge : “This means that media from your camera roll uploaded by this feature to make suggestions will not be used to improve Meta’s AI. Only if you edit the suggestions with our AI tools or publish those suggestions on Facebook can improvements be made to Meta’s AI.” Meta does store your photos in the cloud, and Meta AI does look at them, but it says it doesn’t currently use images to train its artificial intelligence. It also says it doesn’t use your photos to target ads. The data is stored for no longer than 30 days. It’s debatable whether this is true: Meta has also secretly trained its AI models on your public photos since 2007. Not 2017: 2007.