This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
It was only a matter of time.
Meta (META) will use its aggressive push into AI as another vector to collect information about its users and show them ads targeted to their interests across the giant digital advertising company’s social media empire.
Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you to sell you stuff, but more of what we do on our devices will be geared toward selling us stuff, as growing numbers of people unintentionally turn the excitement around AI into sprawling real estate for tech giants to craft and show ads.
Meta announced on Wednesday it will use people’s AI interactions to personalize content and ad recommendations, starting in December. The things you ask Meta’s AI about will be used to infer what you want to see more of, serving as a conduit of attention for Facebook posts and Instagram reels.
This is the logical next step of monetizing AI within Facebook’s ecosystem of social media platforms. It’s easy enough to see how Meta can excel here. All the ways that AI chatbots surpass search engines — relying on conversational language, building a sense of trust or even companionship — invite users to share even more of what they are after, revealing details that people might not otherwise share.
Start chatting with Meta AI about hiking, and you may start getting recommendations for hiking groups, see posts from friends about trails, or get served ads for hiking boots, as Meta explained.
Every digital surface is a potential billboard and a corporate informant.
Zuckerberg may not have been everyone’s top prospect to win the AI contest. But keeping users even more glued to the feed, through AI, would complement his company’s world-conquering attention machine.
But personalized advertising — a pillar of the commercial internet — and algorithmically powered content feeds have drawn increasing backlash in the public imagination. What Meta describes as improving your recommendations, its critics would frame as an extension of sophisticated data surveillance.
Popular critiques of tech platforms, from social, political, and health perspectives, will no doubt gain traction as AI interactions become a larger part of our daily lives and of the data profiles that inform what we see online.
Meta, however, does realize that some conversations should be out of bounds as algorithmic fuel for targeted advertising. When users chat with Meta AI about sensitive topics, including their religious views, sexual orientation, political views, or health, the company says it won’t use that material to show them ads.
This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
It was only a matter of time.
Meta (META) will use its aggressive push into AI as another vector to collect information about its users and show them ads targeted to their interests across the giant digital advertising company’s social media empire.
Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you to sell you stuff, but more of what we do on our devices will be geared toward selling us stuff, as growing numbers of people unintentionally turn the excitement around AI into sprawling real estate for tech giants to craft and show ads.
Meta announced on Wednesday it will use people’s AI interactions to personalize content and ad recommendations, starting in December. The things you ask Meta’s AI about will be used to infer what you want to see more of, serving as a conduit of attention for Facebook posts and Instagram reels.
This is the logical next step of monetizing AI within Facebook’s ecosystem of social media platforms. It’s easy enough to see how Meta can excel here. All the ways that AI chatbots surpass search engines — relying on conversational language, building a sense of trust or even companionship — invite users to share even more of what they are after, revealing details that people might not otherwise share.
Start chatting with Meta AI about hiking, and you may start getting recommendations for hiking groups, see posts from friends about trails, or get served ads for hiking boots, as Meta explained.
Every digital surface is a potential billboard and a corporate informant.
Zuckerberg may not have been everyone’s top prospect to win the AI contest. But keeping users even more glued to the feed, through AI, would complement his company’s world-conquering attention machine.
But personalized advertising — a pillar of the commercial internet — and algorithmically powered content feeds have drawn increasing backlash in the public imagination. What Meta describes as improving your recommendations, its critics would frame as an extension of sophisticated data surveillance.
Popular critiques of tech platforms, from social, political, and health perspectives, will no doubt gain traction as AI interactions become a larger part of our daily lives and of the data profiles that inform what we see online.
Meta, however, does realize that some conversations should be out of bounds as algorithmic fuel for targeted advertising. When users chat with Meta AI about sensitive topics, including their religious views, sexual orientation, political views, or health, the company says it won’t use that material to show them ads.
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