European regulators over Meta's bot with artificial intelligence

Meta has said it has halted plans for its AI assistant in Europe over objections from Ireland's privacy regulator.

Meta said in a blog post that Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has asked the company to suspend training its large language models on content that was made public on Facebook and Instagram profiles.

Meta said they were disappointed by the request, "especially as we included feedback from the regulator and as European data protection authorities were notified back in March". Meta recently started notifying European users that it will be collecting their data. It offered an opt-out option in an attempt to comply with European privacy laws.

The company says it will "continue to cooperate with the Data Protection Authority". But the blog post says that Google and OpenAI "have already used data from Europeans to train AI." In it, Meta argues that if regulatory authorities do not allow user data to be used to train AI models, the result can only be that Meta cannot provide a good enough product. “Simply put, without the inclusion of local information, we could only offer people a second-rate experience. This means that we cannot introduce the Meta AI system in Europe at the moment."

European regulators, on the other hand, welcomed the pause.

"We are pleased that Meta has taken into account our concerns raised by users of their services in the UK and responded to our request to suspend and review plans to use Facebook and Instagram user data to train generative artificial intelligence," it said in a statement. Stephen Almond, executive director of regulatory risk at the UK Information Commissioner's Office, said in a statement.