It’s a “fake PR stunt”: Artists hate Meta’s AI data deletion process

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As the generative artificial intelligence gold rush intensifies, concerns about the data used to train machine learning tools have grown. Artists and writers are fighting for a say in how AI companies use their work, filing lawsuits and publicly agitating against the way these models scrape the internet and incorporate their art without consent.

Some companies have responded to this pushback with “opt-out” programs that give people a choice to remove their work from future models. OpenAI, for example, debuted an opt-out feature with its latest version of the image-to-text generator Dall-E. This August, when Meta began allowing people to submit requests to delete personal data from third parties used to train Meta’s generative AI models, many artists and journalists interpreted this new process as Meta’s very limited version of an opt-out program. CNBC explicitly referred to the request form as an “opt-out tool.”