In a move that absolutely no one could have seen coming, Meta is now set to use your chats with its AI to serve you with personalized ads, and there's absolutely no way for you to opt out or turn it off.
The ascendancy of artificial intelligence has been surrounded by unrelenting optimism from those driving its development, as its tools have been hailed as a means of democratizing creativity and providing access to unlimited intelligence — often for no cost to the user.
You can hypothetically ask an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini anything and it will provide you with an answer, simple as that, yet as development continues it appears that it's not just the environment that's paying every time that you send over a prompt.
As reported by Gizmodo, tech giant Meta has now revealed that it will use data sourced from interactions you have with its AI tools to "personalize the content and ads that you see, including things like posts and reels," according to a new press release.
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What this actually means when it comes to how you use AI and the internet more broadly moving forward is that anything and everything you mention to Meta's AI will be hypothetically used to sell you things, as it becomes increasingly clear that data is the most valuable commodity in the modern age.
The man who created the internet has recently lamented that while it might still remain 'free' to use, it has come at a great cost to your own personal data in recent years, and that's now shown to creep into the AI world too.
So, if you mention to Meta's chatbot that your dream is to go to Japan on holiday or that you're big into fashion, expect to see a lot more ads for flights and clothes in the near future as almost nothing is off limits.
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There are a few things that Meta won't track, as their statement reveals that discussions surrounding religious views, sexual orientation, political beliefs, philosophical perspectives, your health, racial or ethnic orgin, and trade union membership will be off limits when it comes to ad personalization, but everything else is now free game.
What's more, there's currently no way to disable this or opt out of tracking in any way other than to simply stop using the tools, so if it's something that you really care about then you might want to think twice before sharing any information with Meta's AI. You never know who it'll pass it on to.