The change will take effect on December 16 and it means that US users may begin to see or adverts about topics they discuss with the Meta AI chatbot. EU regulations mean European users will not be affected, and neither will users in the UK.
A user asking the bot to help plan a holiday, for example, will soon see travel ads on their Instagram feed.
The approach also relies on chatbot voice conversations on the company’s headsets, and there’s no option for people to opt out of this change, said a privacy policy manager at Meta.
When asked if the company will begin to show ads directly inside the chatbot, the spokesperson said they didn’t “have plans to share.”
The EU has been steadfast in pushing back against Meta’s AI products
Meta has invested heavily in artificial intelligence this year, betting on a technology that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes will change the way people live and interact online.
However the EU has been steadfast in pushing back against Meta’s AI products, citing data privacy concerns.
Meta’s AI chatbot has more than 1 billion monthly users and is a main way that users interact with the company’s AI.
Beyond spending tens of billions of dollars on the infrastructure needed to build AI models and products, Meta has looked for ways to use the technology to enhance its advertising business, which drives almost all of its revenue and pays for the artificial intelligence investments.
It’s unclear whether this change will affect the way that users interact with Meta’s chatbot.
People resort to chatbots from several major tech companies for a wide range of personal needs, using them as stand-ins for medical consultants, financial planners, homework helpers and even romantic partners.
Zuckerberg has suggested that AI chatbots can make people feel less lonely or serve as a kind of therapist.
The Meta spokesperson said feedback from Meta users showed that most people already assumed the company was using these interactions for ad and content targeting.
“We are adding one more signal from AI interactions into the mix in the same way that we use other signals across all of our platforms,” she said, calling this “an incremental change”.
The change won’t apply to conversations held before December 16.
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