Starting this week, the Meta AI chatbot will be available in 41 European countries, including Poland, Meta announced on Thursday. In mid-last year, after intervention by the Irish regulator, Meta halted plans to implement the tool.
AI from Mark Zuckerberg
This week, the Meta AI assistant will begin rolling out in Poland, as well as in over 60 other markets, including 41 European countries, the company said. It also stressed that this is the largest expansion of Meta AI availability in the world to date.
As reported, the first available feature of Meta AI will be an intelligent chatbot, available “for now” in 6 European languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German. The chatbot will be available for free on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
Meta explained that users will be able to use the assistant by exchanging direct messages, “asking questions, exploring interesting topics, or seeking help with troubleshooting.” The company added that the assistant will also be available in group chats, initially on WhatsApp, with the feature eventually rolling out to Messenger and Instagram private messages.
It was announced that Meta AI will also be integrated into search bars across platforms, which will enable it to suggest “best-matching” results from a variety of sources: reels, photos, posts from friends and followers.
Meta said the goal is to make its AI tool available “on par” with the U.S. and that it intends to “gradually” expand its offering in European countries. “Getting Meta AI technology into the hands of Europeans took much longer than the company had planned. The delay was due to the complicated regulatory system of the European Union,” the big tech said.
In the first half of 2024, Meta sent selected Facebook and Instagram users, including those in Poland, notifications regarding the new AI policy and the possibility of using, for example, user posts to train it. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) responded at that time (Meta's European operations are registered in Ireland), which indicated concerns about training AI on European user data obtained from posts, photos and captions published on Facebook and Instagram.
“Opposition is a farce”
Meta offered the possibility of expressing opposition to the new policy, but for this purpose it was necessary to fill in a special form (opt-out). Some experts, including the NGO Noyb, dealing with data protection, claimed that such a practice contradicts the GDPR. Noyb called the objection form offered by Meta “a farce”. He also criticized that Meta reserved the right not to take into account objections.
The organization emphasized that big tech’s practices included many “dormant” Facebook accounts that users barely interacted with anymore, but which still contained vast amounts of personal data. noyb filed 11 complaints related to Meta AI with data protection authorities in various EU countries in June 2024, including the Polish Office for Personal Data Protection (UODO).
Following an intervention by the Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta has suspended AI training on Facebook and Instagram data from EU residents. The Irish Commission, which represented a dozen European bodies in the Meta AI case, expressed its satisfaction with the decision in a statement. It also announced that talks with big tech would continue.
“We are disappointed with the Irish Data Protection Commission's request to delay the implementation of LLM (large language model – PAP) model training on public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram, especially since we have taken into account the concerns of European data protection authorities,” Meta said in a statement published in early June last year. The company noted then that Meta AI “at this time” could not be implemented in the European Union.
“We honor all European objections. If the objection form is submitted before the start of Llama training (a family of large AI language models from Meta – PAP), this person's data will not be used to train these models, neither in the current training round nor in the future,” Meta assured in June 2024.
Meta Platforms is an American corporation that owns social media platforms and messengers: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp. Meta AI is a research division of Meta Platforms that develops artificial intelligence and augmented reality (AR) technologies. In 2023, Meta AI launched a family of large language models called Llama, which have been updated several times since then. (PAP)
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