Facebook Is Starting to Feed Its AI with Private, Unpublished Photos

    The real problem with AI is not when it will become sentient and want to destroy us, it is that we are already in unknown territory. The capabilities are almost infinite and the consequence could be dire. The Internet represents a treasure trove of human knowledge and an immense repository of information.

   The current AIs are almost done with the sum of ALL knowledge available on the Internet and in databanks, believe it or not. The next frontier, the one which requires the huge data centers being built right now, will be meta and synthetic data, which means data created out of other data by linking, deducting, computing AND understanding. 

   Let's imagine the impossible: You have uploaded a picture taken in the street last year. A AI can now enhance the picture, localize it very precisely, recognize any person on the picture, and triangulate the information with ANY other information available. A completely unknown person can now be localized in a specific place at a specific time on your picture. Multiply this by billions of pictures and movie cameras and you can create an almost perfect movie... of every single living person on Earth! 

  This is an almost infinite universe of data, but when you think about it, a frightening one where no privacy can survive very long. China is already there. The West will discover this brave new world more gradually but soon enough.

Via: The Verge:

For years, Meta trained its AI programs using the billions of public images uploaded by users onto Facebook and Instagram’s servers. Now, it’s also hoping to access the billions of images that users haven’t uploaded to those servers. Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images.

On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”

By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information.