Meta is to update its privacy policies so that the company can use interactions with Meta AI to inform the choice of ad placements in Facebook and Instagram feeds. Updates will be presented to users in December as revised terms and conditions that users have to accept to use Meta platforms.
Conversations between end-users and the company’s AI engine will be examined and their contents used to better sell targeted advertising to ad buyers. Meta enables marketers to reach highly-specific user groups by building detailed user profiles from their interactions with Meta’s offerings. These include latest additions to the stable, Vibes, an AI-generated video feed, image generation engine Imagine, and smart glasses the company produces in association with Ray Ban.
The company already uses voice, photos, and videos captured on its Ray Ban smart glasses to train its machine models.
At a briefing with reporters yesterday, Meta privacy policy manager Christy Harris said that the company is still building systems that will support the feature, and took pains to clarify that the contents of conversations between Meta AI and users about sensitive topics – politics, sexual orientation, religion, etc. – will not be used to inform ad targeting. There will be no opt-out offered to users, although the change in T&Cs and the use of conversations’ contents will not be rolled out to users in the UK, South Korea, and EU states. Here, local legislation prevents unfettered access to user data without explicit consent.
Meta claims a billion users a month interact with Meta AI, a feature that is offered free at the point of consumption. Data from Meta AI interactions will further enrich the profiles the company already holds on its users, meaning more granular persona identification, and for the end-user, better personalisation of sponsored posts in their feeds.
However, the high cost of running AI services means that the company can begin to offset some of those costs with revenues from paid ad buyers, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinting in the past that there may be plans to place ads directly in Meta’s AI products. In addition to Meta, several big technology companies are looking at ways they can finance their own AI investments. Google announced yesterday it intends to show ads in the Gemini-generated search results shown in AI Mode in Google Search and Chrome.
OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, has also said that it intends to extend the facility for ChatGPT users to be able to shop directly from inside chats with the AI model, while Perplexity already offers in-chat shopping and payments. Companies can create in-chat storefronts via the Copilot Merchant Program so they can be represented in the Microsoft eco-system.
The vast majority of Meta’s income comes from targeted advertising, and it seems the company is looking to use AI to double-down on its existing business model to offset the cost of its investments in the technology overall. Google’s strategy is similar, using AI to extend and enrich its offerings to users, rather than the OpenAI route, which is to promote multi-use standalone models that continue to struggle to make significant impact in any specific area of business.
(Image source: “Ray-Ban” by Thomas8047 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)
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