Facebook Stepping Up its Memory Grab

Facebook is stepping up its grab of your personal memories. When you post to its Story feature, there’s a pop up asking if you’d like to opt in to use “cloud processing” of your images, allowing Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis.”

Wait, wut?

Facebook says this will allow it to make collages, recaps, or theme your images into categories like birthdays or graduations. The real purpose is to get even more material to train their AI.

As Tina Nguyen writes in The Verge, “For years, Meta’s trained its AI programs using the billions of public images uploaded by users onto Facebook and Instagram’s servers. But apparently, Meta has decided to try training its AI on the billions of images that users haven’t uploaded to those servers.”

Here’s the link to her article: https://www.theverge.com/meta/694685/meta-ai-camera-roll

This calls out another example of me not being able to write fiction fast enough before it comes true. In my near-future speculative fiction novels, I’ve written about a corporation called MIND that tries to convince people to let it store their memories on its servers. It then uses those memories to train its AI and make personalized ads.

Apparently, Facebook needs more of our memories to train on, so why not give it the pictures you haven’t published yet? By the way, don’t do this. Opt out. Your memories are your own, not the property of a corporation.

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We’re at the stage with AI now that we were at decades ago with the internal combustion engine. Cars are convenient, and society took them up without considering the damage fossil fuels would do to the world, even though we were warned about the damage that was possible. We were warned back in the 1970s. The fossil fuel companies knew the damage they would cause. Even back then.

I feel the same way about AI. We know the potential damage it can cause to our humanity, our intellect, and to culture, but it is convenient, like a car. At least we can consider how we use it, if we need it for everything, and stay aware of which companies are developing it to help humans or to benefit corporations. Which AI companies want to care for the world in the long term and which are in it for themselves in the short term?

[Steps down from soapbox. Returns to previously scheduled tasks.]