Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In today’s edition…Meta admits only regulation will stop it from scraping user data to train its AI products; AI models get more multimodal (and more emotional); big tech splurges big on AI equipment.
During a government inquiry earlier this week in Australia, Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh admitted that the company scraped the public photos and posts of every Australian adult user to train its AI models without providing an option to opt out—because it can. More specifically, because regulators haven’t stopped it from doing so.
