Meta is about to make your chats with its AI assistant part of its advertising machine, the company announced Wednesday. Beginning Dec. 16, conversations with Meta AI—the company’s chatbot embedded across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and even its new Ray-Ban Display smart glasses—will be used to determine which ads and recommendations show up in your feed.
The company will start formally notifying users of the change on Oct. 7. There’s no opt-out: If you don’t want your chatbot conversations influencing your ads, the only option is not to use Meta AI at all.
Emily Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington and coauthor of the widely cited “Stochastic Parrots” paper on the risks of large language models (LLMs), told Fortune the company is blurring a dangerous line.
“They’re already farming your clicks and posts to target ads. Now they’re mining your conversations with chatbots,” Bender said. “The obvious next concern is whether the chatbot itself will start nudging people to disclose information that makes them more targetable.”
It’s surveillance under the guise of personalization, Bender argues, with unprecedented abilities to extract personal details from users.“Before, Meta’s systems watched who you connected to and what your communities were doing. Now it’s directly: What are you saying to the company?” she said. “And, of course, they can combine that with all the other data they already have.”
