Opening up a whole new dimension of adtech personalization/engagement here... more evil brainstorming:
- electronic billboards on the bus corner start doing this while walking down the street
- your favorite peacock sitcom starts injecting your friends or recent vacation locations or friends' recent vacation locations on the main character's digital picture frame. Your buddy recently went to Sandals Resort in Jamaica? Now that's going to be emphasized in the unused screen real estate in the background of the bar scene to play on your fomo.
- hell, sporting games already have digital billboards on the field barriers that are customized for different markets / broadcasters... why not customize them further for the individual stream
I've always wondered about that scene: does everyone around him see him in the ads as well? If so, that would mean that they're appropriating his image to sell to others. Perhaps they're laser / audio projections, so each person only sees their own ad.
So do I. Either people in the Minority Report world are immune to all that constant visual and audio noise thrown at them, and everyone hears every slogan along with names. Or these ads are somehow personalized and isolated voice (while portrayed as an unified mess) reaches particular person based on their movement in the public space.
Phased array speakers can focus sound in a specific direction. The visuals I don't have a good answer for but the sound part could definitely be done with existing technology
Truly one of the most prophetic movies in recent memory. It started out innocently enough with people just stealing the gestures and UIs from the film. But we have now progressed to also taking the highly targeted and personalized advertising coupled with mass surveillance and even the idea of precrime that is now being built around AI as if that is more accurate than the fantastical psychics of the movie. Just another example of us creating the torment nexus.
About 4 years ago I was at a VC pitch day and one of the teams rehearsing their pitch before hand was basically proposing this for augmented reality. I was mildly horrified that people saw that sort of thing as something people would want, but hey - $$$ is all that matters right? I really hope those folks never got funded.
Why do you think Meta bought VR tech and took it further? To pour ads directly into our brains. It's just that scuba sized VR tech it didn't catch on, so instead they invested in Luxottica now to make AR fashion items with the same purpose.
Standard internet outrage bait. There are no ads in the photos. The person uploaded their photo to Meta AI's "imagine me" feature which generates photos of you in exotic situations, and now the company is...putting them in exotic situations. That's literally what it is for.
It's technically opt-in. You have to use their image generator, which requires agreeing to this "images appear in your feed randomly" feature implicitly. [0] You think you're just generating 1 photo, but you're actually signing up to a service that generates photos and adds them to your instagram feed. Even their help docs don't mention that nuance though. [1] It's not technically an ad, even though it mostly functions like one since the purpose of these images isn't anything more than bait to get the user to use meta ai more... I guess.
These are newly generated images, not promoted by you, shown in your feed. That’s the true “service” on offer here, images are generated for you and put on your timeline.
But the UI to sign up for this service looks like a “type in the text box, get an image” sort of service. It also doesn’t mention this instagram integration, other than requiring you to log in with a meta account.
You still get to make your own promoted images, so that’s marginally useful.
The main weirdness is it making its own images, on your behalf.
If you get value from random slop images with no particular theme, then cool. You can look at them as they show up.
But really, these are just throw away assets. It’s just meant to get you to click thru into the meta.ai upsell this links to.
It’s not quite an ad… because technically… it did something for you? There’s some implication that this random feed of useless images of you is… valuable. So it’s a service you accidentally walk into using, that just happens to redirect you to meta.ai when you click on it.
It's absolutely still an ad; ads sometimes include samples, like when they hand out small bites in the supermarket, those might be tasty ads, but they are still ads.
It's not an ad. It's someone trying to figure out what to do with the crap ton of GPUs they've been allocated and told to find some way to show metrics for usage going up, up, up, and the only way they can think to accomplish that is to get people to use them with zero interaction, since basically nobody cares to engage with the features otherwise.
Gotta say, this first batch of released AI features for the masses has been deeply underwhelming. Custom emojis and random pictures of me in random situations in some feed where the only reason I'm not scrolling past it is that it's a picture of me I don't remember being in hardly seems worth the valuations the stock market has been giving these things.
I suspect that if there was a way to clean up the metrics to see only what people actually wanted to engage with with these AI products, it would pop the bubble instantly. So much gaming the metrics by forcing it on people then claiming victory for the AI.
(I don't use LLMs for coding but at least that has a very clear value proposition. Search is nice now, but mostly because conventional search was ruined with malice aforethought... search AIs will follow soon enough. Enjoy that honeymoon while you can.)
It is still weird. Imagine you try out Photoshop online with your private photos. A few minutes later, you start seeing ads with those same photos edited in different ways. Even if those ads are visible only to you, it will still feel pretty creepy.
No, the person uploaded their photo to Meta AI to get a picture with some background, once. They then started seeing ads for MetaAI offering to generate more images of them, for a cost. Only the ads were still using their face from the photo they only uploaded once.
This is like using an online photo editing tool once, and then seeing ads to that photo editing tool show up on the internet, still using the image you up loaded that one time.
There's no cost to watch other shows on HBO, but the 2 minute promo they play for a different HBO show before playing the show you requested is 100% an ad.
I’ve developed a habbit of automatically downvoting the top comment on most popular submissions because more often than not they are always some knee-jerk, often stupid contrarian reaction to the submission.
I don’t know when this trend started but I don’t remember it being this bad in the past.
but putting that aside meta does give themself the right to use your face for ads and has used it and has won law suites about it before (through the cases I was aware of are quite old, i.e. before various right to be forgotten laws or GDPR).
So if they want to use your face to create an bot account to "increase engagement" they probably can do so without (legal) repercussions.
What nobody mentions about "only you can see this" is that "you" refers to ordinary users of the service and there is no mention if employees are included in that grouping. It has happened before that systems secure from the public were misused by persons with privileges within the organization.
The obvious response is "well, yeah. So? They need it." but that's not how ordinary people, who don't deal with this daily, think. When they see "only you can see this" I think they take it literally.
The computer is always watching and sometimes so are the people running the computers.
That's... not an ad? User used Meta AI to touch up a selfie, now Meta AI is generating more selfies for you.
I can understand the annoyance from cross-linking apps in the same way it's annoying to get the Threads popup in your feed, but really, this is utter clickbait.
kind of an interesting question -- are product nudges ads? like when there's a button to use a paid feature which pops up on top of a different button, is it an ad? it's not third party.
I remember being utterly baffled by this as a kid at other peoples houses. "Let me get this straight, you pay a bunch of money for 'special' TV channels that say they have no ads, and you still have to watch ads? What kind of insane horseshit is this?".
Put me off non free to air TV for my entire adult life until streaming services became a thing, and you better believe I'm immediately unsubscribing from those the second they pause a video I'm watching to show me promos or ads.
I mean it really is an ad, just an ad for one of Meta’s own products. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is quite literally an ad where one team is winning the ad auction to place these into the feed.
It's only a matter of time before this gets put into the programmatic ad formats where you can do individual level targeting. The advertiser won't ever have to see your image as meta will offer it as a service. More importantly, just like things like pmax (google's current optimization product), your account manager will heavily incentive you towards running these AI campaigns.
I'll play some defence for them here. You were playing with Meta's AI face tool, and now it's taken some results from that and swapped them in where ads would usually go. I'm assuming they don't do this if you just uploaded photos to Facebook/Instagram, you seemingly gave them a picture with the direct intent of them using it to make AI images.
It doesn't seem that much different from when I'm typing a chat reply in Snapchat and it starts automatically suggesting stickers with mine and my friends' faces doing silly things with cartoon bodies. Or using my avatar to try and upsell me to their premium subscription. Don't give them a picture of your face to mess around with if you don't like them messing around using a picture of your face.
I suspect the eventual goal is to get citizens to train their own AI avatars, and then those avatars will be used to market to the citizens, to do market research, product research, manipulate politicians, etc. Will you click through letting them do what they want with an AI simulation of you? It starts with a photo. The "next big thing" is agents they say, a personal AI that you train to do things for you. And which incidentally builds an AI simulation of you, the ultimate training data for large models. You are the (AI training) product.
> Don't give them a picture of your face to mess around with if you don't like them messing around using a picture of your face.
OK. In fact, I'll do better than that. I won't interact with any of their products or services in any way, including blocking all their domains several times over in various browser extensions.
Snapchat, too.
Actually I used my time machine to implement it already.
How much surreal harassment will you people put up with?
I instantly revoked Facebook's access to my photos a few years back, when it had taken photos from my camera roll and put it into my feed with a "do you want to share this"? I was browsing on the subway, and did not expect a medical picture of me showing up for everyone there to see. And I realized facebook as well could do what they wanted with my pictures.
Meta AI asks permission to do this, but note that in some U.S. states personal publicity rights end upon death. Isn't it hilariously Wallacian that this technology can be used to make targeted ads featuring the viewers deceased loved ones?
I'd say this is common wisdom on sites like HN, very much not outside the tech bubble. I can immediately bring to mind a good number of non-tech family members who would be completely freaked out by this.
There is an interesting phenomenon going on here. On one hand, this is pretty mundane: a software tool you’re currently using shows you examples of ways to use the software. On the other hand, this does technically constitute an “ad”.
What’s interesting to me is that some people seem to have a strong emotional reaction to the fact that it’s possible to describe this as “Instagram using my face in an ad,” even if the underlying event lacks the characteristics that would make that statement outrageous.
It's not mundane. The screenshots show Instagram displaying an ad for Meta AI. The user is not currently using MetaAI, they are using Instagram, so it's not at all "showing examples of ways to use the software you are currently using".
It's more similar to Windows trying to sell you OneDrive through the Security Center, which is widely loathed, and recognized as an ad.
> It's not mundane. The screenshots show Instagram displaying an ad for Meta AI.
Well, there it is again: what seems to make it objectionable is that it fits a certain definition, rather than it exhibiting some intrinsically objectionable features. (Note I’m not criticizing this; I just find it interesting.)
Since I don’t personally see this as an ad, I might describe it as “The screenshots show an example of output that the user can generate with Meta AI. The example shown isn’t emotionally enagaging, and it resembles placeholder content.”
What would make this stand out for me is if Meta owned a tooth whitening business, and then used this placement to show a version of myself with a whiter smile. Or any of the other dystopian examples in this thread. But the one that actually occurred just doesn’t register for me as a breach of trust.
"It's an ad" is shorthand for "this is trying to manipulate me to do/buy something". So the problem is not that it fits the definition of "ad", the problem, spelled out completely, is that they are using my likeness in something that is trying to manipulate me to do or buy something (do, in this case, since as far as others are saying, this is free of charge).
Also, while the example shown does resemble placeholder content, it pretty clearly seems designed to evoke an emotional response, it seems designed to appear cool and futuristic.
And regardless, people have a very high sensitivity to how their image is used. If I haven't given Instagram specific permission to use my image for something, it really really can't use my image for that thing. This goes beyond issues like copyright, it's a very basic human right to control how your own likeness is used.
Some growth team probably has goal to move a metric. This promotion is one of their experiments. If they move the metric, they can cite that in their performance review. If the promotion causes bad PR (see this thread) and none of the pre-launch reviews flagged it, they can then share what they learned with others in the company. They will say something like “lead a cross functional team to develop best practices for use of AI-generated pictures of a user in promotions” in their pronounce review.
Either way, we get experimented on like lab rates and they get their bonus.
Agree with your sentiment, but I'd take it one step further: why doesn't anyone calling the shots at Meta realize just how uncool it is to do such a thing? Which is the same reaction I had to their recent AI influencers.
It speaks to their seeming inability to read the zeitgeist on the general public's attitude towards generative AI at the moment. I'm generally "pro AI", in that I think generative AI is incredibly interesting tech that can potentially be used to create some very cool (and maybe even helpful) things. But "AI" has become a dirty word among the people I know who aren't living in our tech bubble - uncool at best, and evil at worst.
And every time I see something like this, I understand perfectly why they feel that way. Every new hamfisted or creepy attempt at inserting AI into everything by companies like Meta just digs the hole even deeper for people's perception of generative AI.
They're on the edge with the phrase "Imagined for you" but this is an ad - for their model, using their users faces if they happen to not opt-out.
They did sent mails out last May for instagram (and fb iirc too) in the EU saying you can opt-out of processing in their AI 'improvements'. It was done by filling out a form where you had to tell in a few words why you don't want to participate. Acc. to the message changes came into place on 26th June 2024.
> "(...) we will now rely on a legal basis called legitimate interests to use your data and to develop and improve AI on Meta's services. This means that you have the right to object to the way your data is used for this purpose. If your objection is recognised, it will automatically be recognised in the future."
I'd say it's like you'd develop your photos at the workshop where they say they can randomly use their clients photos in ads in your local papers or whatever. And then you do bump on a poster of your local travel agency including yourself lying on the beach in Saint-Tropez/France slapped all over the city. Where of course you haven't been to France at all.
No, the user had to have already used Meta AI for Meta to have their data to generate additional images. They aren’t taking a random photo from your reel and using that to create an ai version of it. There’s a whole process to image your face that this poster had to go through.
Hence the bit in the title: “Used Meta AI to edit a selfie, now instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me.”
"buy this shit" and "use this shit we made" is still an advert. Just because the person receiving the advert doesn't pay for the product themselves via cash and instead is paying via their personal data doesn't mean the post is not advertisement.
The post is literally advertising MetaAI's product??? Do you know what an advert's definition is?
When I saw the original link on bluesky, I didn't have time to look into it, I had assumed it was something like a post where a sponsor had paid meta to show a user a picture of said user in one of their adverts. Ie meta was being paid to whore out your likeness.
Look, I don't like meta any more than you do. But this is a service that is provided by them. Its not an advert, meta aren't making money from generating that user's likeness, or any other.
I don't like GenAI, its going to ruin an industry I love, one I wanted to return to. When the bubble pops, its probably going to make me loose my job too. But this isn't an advert.
Jesus Christ the victim blaming in this thread is insane. This is why deepfake laws are needed. Sure OP used Meta AI, and consented, but if I did that I'd probably be consenting to using the picture _for that one session_, where I'm in control. Definitely not for this, they shouldn't be able to put this in their ToS.
Absolutely. The public doesn’t care what word games you play or what rights you allocate yourself in a terms of service if you pull off something shady you deserve all the bad publicity you get
> but if I did that I'd probably be consenting to using the picture _for that one session_, where I'm in control.
You mean you you'd be wanting to consent to one session, while actually affirmatively consenting to something else. On one hand I agree there would be nothing wrong with limiting the scope of what is legally allowed in a ToS. On the other, I also think it's good that single parties can't just spontaneously wish away conditions of business agreements they don't like (although I imagine with a modicum of effort, you could modify that consent with Meta at any point).
There's a comment in the reddit thread about how consent to Meta is invalid because Meta is essential to participating in modern society - basically saying that being a Meta user is a civil right. Bonkers.
Companies need to be reminded that their operation is subject to our own ToS, the law, and it supercedes theirs. We can change it at any time and the sycophants defending any legal behavior aren't winning any favors. The behavior you see on HN playing defense for violations of privacy is disgusting, but I'm glad it's out in the open for everyone to see how far they'll go.
I don't think it's victim blaming to say that the linked Reddit post is missing critical details (and indeed any details) about what precisely is going on. I agree that it's quite bad if Meta did this without the user specifically asking them to do so.
What better way to increase the hyperreality needed to sell products then to have you in the ad! But also this is HN, so someone needs tk lecture you on “what you mean” and also remind you it’s their product you used and signed up for and signed your rights away too so it’s YOUR fault, or some such pompous condescending trash. I say, lucky you! I say, embrace the future! I say, plaster my face on adult diaper ads and sell them to me. I say, slap my face on that TRT ad from my podcast that I listen to in my lonely apartment to feel a connection to the world while I write code that “matters”. It’s a beautiful world.
Facebook is doing a public service here by being overt.
Anyone else would just quietly take your face and those of your contacts and use it to generate an endless stream of faces which are unambiguously not you, yet compellingly familiar.
...maximizing their brainwashing effectiveness while minimizing the ick factor and triggering privacy minding behaviors.
A lot of harm is done in the world by parties adaptively keeping their invasive conduct at just below the level which will trigger retaliation, legislation, etc. Like databrokers will sell exceptionally private data to anyone with a few bucks, but it's only a 'data breach' when someone takes that data without paying. The existence of databreaches even provides nice plausible deniability for harms that arise from the business of privacy-invasion-for-profit.
I really hate ai generated images of real people. If we thought Photoshop was bad for body image issues this is like putting that effect on heroin. I hope there's a massive backlash against this AI shit tbh. Leave it to meta to find a psychologically toxic application for any given technology.
wait until they generate your, possibly long dead, grandmother (just using information of your and your parents faces and voices) convincing you to try that brand of pies.
Nah. Street View was also a big hubbub back then. People are not even mentioning it anymore.
>Things that feel illegal will probably become illegal someday
Also, if you think about this phrasing for just a second, this is the chilling effect. Suppressing expression due to the anticipation of negative outcomes.
Some was mitigated, but I don't think that faces and plates were what had the biggest bang about it. It's a complete, 360 capture of a large part of public places, with people still being clearly identifiable, correlated with satellite imagery (which was pointed out as creepy and privacy-invading as well, upon its public release), resolution so high that you can read many texts, and you can still see in windows, into yards, all kinds of stuff. Wikipedia has a lengthy article about the different concerns. And yet, despite it feeling creepy and strange for many, it just became normal. People look up random places for fun, to hunt for their new home, for driving instructions, GeoGuessr is cool and has a league of its own... it's a creepy, risky new thing becoming part of life, that's why I brought it up.
Smartphones could be another good example. As the joke goes, people in the 60s are afraid the government wiretaps their phones. Nowadays, they say: "Hey wiretap! Do you have a recipe for pancakes?"
All the hate tech journalists gave the EU because Apple Intelligence isn't launched there was insane, yet this is what EU legislation is designed to avoid.
I didn't know that nestle and shell had AI departments.
Look, I'm not +1 the EU here, but having some level of legal protection against marauding corporations is good. Sure EU based companies are evil, but they can't be as abusive to normal people because they are constrained by a semi-functional legal system.
The US used to have that as well, along with a functioning legislature.
They do not. I can't even begin to explain to you how delusional this is.
To be clear, I gave testimony to the NTHSA that the first Porsche Taycan was unfit for road driving due to extreme errors in the software architecture and in part got the CEO of Porsche fired. (Specifically error handling so laughably bad it caused the entire car to lock up at speed.)
The EU only FOLLOWED grudgingly after the US demanded the recall. I am extremely aware of EXACTLY how risk-taking European companies are.
This isn't helpful or realistic. It's becoming more and more difficult to keep all your personal data private and function in society, which is all by design for companies like Meta.
People are not born with knowledge, however trivial it seem after knowing it. Same thing with privilege: different perspectives are earned with experience, not something that we start with.
> These are not ads, rather something that is generated natively by the platform, not leading anywhere else but the platform that the user is already on.
Is this post Advertising a product? Yes, it is advertising a MetaAI product. Just because it's not an external ad, doesn't mean it's not an ad. Hulu shows me adds for other Hulu shows. This is an ad despite me not leaving that streaming site.
You are right, that is still and ad. Platform ads are really common for anyone running their own ad exchange. Sometimes its just to use up supply, other times its to meet in house goals.
This is technically true, these are advertisements. But not what first come to mind when reading the title "Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me", which would be third-party ads, so this is my point. The title is sensational, a play on this misunderstanding, rather than being substantial.
My ick levels are about the same whether it’s used by third parties or just Meta. It’s a mega corporation using my likeness to manipulate my behavior for their own ends.
When someone signs up for facebook they are agreeing that any image they upload is something they are explicitly granting them permission to use. Where's the "ick"? They already gave them permission, whether they read the fine print or not.
No one said third-party ads, the description is perfectly accurate to what is happening. The knee jerk reaction to call it sensationalist is odd to me.
You edited to claim that "ad" is commonly understood to mean "3rd party ad", when in fact that is not true, and it's irrelevant either way. The idea of using my likeness in ads is disgusting, and likely illegal, even if they are first party ads.
For starters, what's '3rd party'? I remember when Google-Fi or whatever it was had the poorly animated, jingle sung-by-a 'totally not trying to cop Randy Newman vibe' ads. Would that be a 3rd party in that case?
> Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages and qualities of interest to consumers.
Nobody ever said that advertising must involve a third party.
I feel like advertisements are on a spectrum, and that (let's call them) "first party" advertisements are not what come to people's minds, when they read a title like "Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me". I'd like to prove this point by the following image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=instagram+ads&iax=images&ia... . The top results all relate to advertise something on Instagram that is not Meta-related - so, third party ads.
Lol, literally calling an ad by meta not an ad. If they do it for Meta, the next logical step. This is from the same company that wanted to create official bots that would post, comment, react.
Meta at this point is just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks as a product. I am not afraid of my data being stolen, but it is a wake up call for what to expect.
>Meta at this point is just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks
I feel the very same from the OP reddit submission. OP used Meta AI, and then Meta AI used it for more Meta AI. I'm sorry but this is a far cry from "Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me". The implications of this title, and the situation it describes differ greatly. For example, if the user used Meta AI, and then got an ad of themselves driving a car, drinking a coffee, wearing some clothing, and the ad would be about that product itself, then I would have not made the original comment at all.
You're fighting way harder on this than I would, but I do agree that the title had me imagining being served an ad where I'm using the product being sold to me. Ads already are trying to make you think you'd be happy or popular by using their product by showing you people acting like that. It kicks that up to another level to literally see yourself happy because you're using a product that someone wants to sell you.
> These are not ads, rather something that is generated natively by the platform, not leading anywhere else but the platform that the user is already on
So if Instagram shows you ads about Meta AI, it doesn't count as ads because both are owned by Meta?
Yes, in my mind, just saying "ads" are more for like Nike or Hyundai, than for a service provider upselling its own products. But this point is technically valid, these are advertisements as well. Just not what I, or others, first think of when they read "Instagram is using my face on ads".
My point is, and I even edited the original comment so that it comes across better: "ads on instagram" implies third party ads much more, than fist party upsells. Another example is "Ads in Windows". The popup for OneDrive is much less egregious than Candy Crush, or tabloid news in the Start Menu. This is because, while the user asked for neither, some consent was already given for the first party, while no consent was given to the third party.
What you call an opinion is not my original point, and even if so, I don't understand what you are trying to say. Shouldn't I have expressed an opinion here?
I really don't see a difference between upsell and 3rd party ads.
I stopped using Evernote (was a paying subscriber) because I got annoyed by constantly having ads for their other services shoved in my face.
The user gave their picture to Meta AI in Instagram previously, and Meta AI and Instagram have the same parent company, and the user also encountered the advertisement on Instagram. This is as first party as it gets, in my Hacker News submissions. Maybe not in legal language.
They are an Instagram post that is shown to make you buy something, not because anyone you follow posted it. So, it's an ad. The fact that they're using your face in a Meta ad doesn't make it any different from any other ad.
You're probably thinking about this as not a problem from a privacy perspective, and you may be right that this is not technically a privacy issue. But it's still a huge problem from a psychological influence perspective. Ads are already extremely good at manipulating your psyche, adding the ability to show you personally in some wonderful situations that their product would apparently put you in is a whole other level in manipulation.
Plus, if this gets normalized, the next step is absolutely going to be to sell this as a new type of ad to other brands (assuming people end up interacting with such ads more).
Edit to say: thinking about it, I actually think it's a privacy violation even for a Meta ad. Giving them permission to use an image of my face to generate a better selfie doesn't give them permission to use it to serve me ads. The GDPR is pretty specific about this: when you opt into sharing personal data for a specific purpose, that has to be interpreted in a narrow sense, you can't arbitrarily broaden the scope.
I'd bet that this would be a bridge too far for many people, even the newer generations. People want to control how their likeness is used, many are not even happy to appear in their friends' pictures (at least to get tagged) unless they like the result and are asked before hand.
That seems like a strange conclusion with the extravagant use of heavy filtering so that nobody actually looks like what their social presence implies.
They just need to tweaking the marketing and release it as a filter, but then include weasel words text that says anything used by the filter allows for them to selectively choose images to use as marketing. Essentially reversing the flow with sneaky consent
I'm with you. If I am at a bar and I see a sign that says "PBR - $3", I don't think of that as an advertisement. This user opted into Meta AI and (perhaps 'unknowingly' as no one reads the terms) gave their consent for this to happen, so I think 'hysteria' is appropriate and it's clear to me that here in the comments, opinions about this are based on feelings and not facts, and for that reason, it has to be described in misleading ways.
I, too, have "used Meta AI", and have not had this happen to me. But I did not use Meta AI to generate pictures of me, so I did not check the box that led to this. That is one of the number of ways the way this post is titled in a way that is misleading. Simply "using Meta AI" in any capacity did not lead to this outcome.
Additionally, the title suggests that the user gave his photos to Meta AI, and then a separate service, Instagram, is using his photos. That's not what is happening, he gave his photos to Meta AI (likely inside Instagram) and then Meta AI is using them (inside Instagram). There's no need to pretend two different services are sharing their photos around, but the post title is more engaging if there's the suggestion otherwise.
When I worked as a waiter, we were supposed to tell the customers about the drink / appetizer specials before taking orders. This dialogue was in fact advertising as those were the high margin offerings at every restaurant.
In any case I think it's more analogous to ads for tv shows while you're trying to watch a tv show. The media you want to consume (news feed) has ads interjected in it, in order to get you to spend more time consuming more content.
Not really. OP was already an Instagram and Meta AI user. So, in the TV analogy, this would be like telling you about an upcoming programme, while you are watching a channel.
I fully agree. There is a lot, a wide spectrum of abuse that Meta can be attacked for, and this little thing is not one of them. I think this is why I feel so personal about this - I do dislike Meta a lot, but I like it when people roast it for the actually valid reasons. I'm sorry for the downvotes, and appreciate your support.
If Instagram shows you an old post with a picture thats got a filter on, or grouped some of your pictures together into a frame, saying "look back on your memories and repost" is that an advert?
When your post comes up in the explore page of another user, is that an advert?
what about those stupid "Here is a post from your friends on threads" with most of the stuff cropped off, as soon as you try and click it, its loads the fucking app store?
Meta have done some terrible shit, but this isn't up there. Its not even a mili-cambridge analyitica. (or a pico-myanmar) its just a shitty app in their shitty social network.
It seems like we are just hipster-hate yak shaving on something pointless, and missing the much wider point that the US needs decent data protections laws, and a functioning legislature.
Your examples are not ads, because they are not trying to convince you to buy anything, or even to give Instagram/Meta any more data about yourself. Advertising a completely separate Meta business (Meta AI is not Instagram) is an entirely different thing.
This ad is also nothing what you describe - the user was already a Meta AI user. From the title: "Used Meta AI, now Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me". So what happened is that Meta AI did a few extra easy image manipulations, and showed it to its user, on the same platform nonetheless, not even on Facebook or something.
We don't know some of this. MetaAI can be used independently of Instagram, I believe, so I don't know if it's certain that the user used it through Instagram. Also, don't they have a paid tier that they are likely trying to get them to upgrade to?
I fully agree. The reddit post is a nothingburger. It feels like it's more about someone wanting to express themselves, or fish for something that might worth good feedback, than someone who actually has something worthwhile to say.
The actual good that this thing has is some feedback for people, to think about whether they want to use these platforms, or not. Being conscious about stuff like these is what I think does good to the world, and the well-being of people.
For starters, how is it not a violation (eg. "personality rights") to use a person's likeness without permission?
As a further example, do we really want insurance companies serving ads using near and dear ones as potential disaster victims? This is really getting out of hand.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but this is kinda cool! As long as the user data doesn't leave the Meta ecosystem (no reason to think it does right now, the ad in question here is from Meta itself), it's not a privacy concern since only you are being shown those unique ads with you in them.
Even if other advertisers start using the system, as long as the generated resulting images are never shared with the advertisers and are unique to each user, its just a futuristic way to help you "imagine" what having XYZ product would be like, which is what most ads strive to do.
People have knee-jerk reactions to anything to do with ads because of the privacy concerns of yesterday, understandably. But if you actually step back and think about this, there's no reduction in privacy that I can see. If people are creeped out by it, I think they should maybe let people disable them with a setting.
But in general, making ads more effective without giving advertisers more data about us is a great thing for the continuation of free amazing internet services!
Man, I absolutely cannot disagree more. If a service wants to use my face in an ad they need to ask me for permission first. The gradual erosion of user autonomy we’ve seen online over the past few decades never ceases to amaze me.
> People have knee-jerk reactions to anything to do with ads because of the privacy concerns of yesterday, understandably.
Can you elaborate on this? What were the privacy concerns of yesterday that we don’t need to worry about today?
It's an ad only you can see, I don't see the harm.
> What were the privacy concerns of yesterday that we don’t need to worry about today?
The web/internet is a hell of a lot more private today than 10 years ago. Third party cookies are basically gone, mobile tracking is going out the door with Apple leading that charge, there are tons of relatively popular browsers and extensions that reduce tracking even more, there's enough privacy legislation that big companies have had to re-architect to preserve privacy as much as possible by default.
Hell, if we're just talking about Meta, they literally nuked a thriving third-party developer API ecosystem to appease people's privacy concerns, out right.
There were times when users warned about the consequences of putting your images on the net. If you upload them on Facebook services, you gave away the rights on them I believe.
If they use your picture to advertise to your friends, showing you in a nike shoe or whatever, that's still okay? It still wouldn't have left the Meta ecosystem.
They might create an AI-generated person who closely resembles your friend but not exactly. If they do it undetected, it could have a massive impact. Imagine an ad featuring someone who looks just like your crush. I really hope this gets banned before anyone tries it.
This scenario reminds me of Amazon Prime’s Live TV with hyper-targeted advertising. A friend who has it noticed that his ads revealed what he and his wife had browsed on Amazon. It was fun at times to see that we’d all been looking at the same items, but it also felt a bit too personal. Now he never turn on his TV whenever guests visit.
As much as I loathe ads, I actually agree with you. I think these are good points. Among others, it's a very important realization that just by properly using these services, so much of the privacy has been given up already. It's just that services are clever about this, same as how corrupt populists: they do the damage, but keep away the negative feedback as much as they can, hiding, delaying, projecting, doesn't matter, as long as people don't feel it.
This is why this ad seems outrageous: it provides this feedback. Demonstrates just a little bit of the power that they have over the person. So the user immediately sobered up, maybe even vowed something to the opposite.
I think you all pro-AI clusters should face the fact straight that people hate AI generated images.
AI as an art style evokes primal hate and rage. If you show images to people that are linked to such set of emotions, such set of emotions arise among audiences. As demonstrated.
This tendency of current AI image generators needs to be fixed before AI image generators could be used to create positive impacts.
> But in general, making ads more effective without giving advertisers more data about us is a great thing for the continuation of free amazing internet services!
Too right! Sure, Facebook may have facilitated multiple ethnic cleansings around the world, but its a small price to pay to facilitate a dystopian future in which tech illiterate, elderly boomers are bombarded with AI generated ads of their own funerals that encourage them to buy life assurance policies...
Opening up a whole new dimension of adtech personalization/engagement here... more evil brainstorming:
- electronic billboards on the bus corner start doing this while walking down the street
- your favorite peacock sitcom starts injecting your friends or recent vacation locations or friends' recent vacation locations on the main character's digital picture frame. Your buddy recently went to Sandals Resort in Jamaica? Now that's going to be emphasized in the unused screen real estate in the background of the bar scene to play on your fomo.
- hell, sporting games already have digital billboards on the field barriers that are customized for different markets / broadcasters... why not customize them further for the individual stream
There’s a scene in Minority Report of a mall and it’s basically this. The billboards scan you and then target you directly as you go by.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ
I've always wondered about that scene: does everyone around him see him in the ads as well? If so, that would mean that they're appropriating his image to sell to others. Perhaps they're laser / audio projections, so each person only sees their own ad.
Or worse: he needed to consent to a TC that allows they do use his image if he wanted to enter the shopping.
Dude don't go posting ideas like this on HN. Come on man.
There are already displays that do this, no lasers necessary. I forget the name for them though… maybe a type of lenticular display?
Cool use case: personalizing wayfinding signage e.g. in an airport
Bad use case: most of the rest of them
So do I. Either people in the Minority Report world are immune to all that constant visual and audio noise thrown at them, and everyone hears every slogan along with names. Or these ads are somehow personalized and isolated voice (while portrayed as an unified mess) reaches particular person based on their movement in the public space.
Phased array speakers can focus sound in a specific direction. The visuals I don't have a good answer for but the sound part could definitely be done with existing technology
If you take a listen to the linked video, you'll hear other names than his.
Truly one of the most prophetic movies in recent memory. It started out innocently enough with people just stealing the gestures and UIs from the film. But we have now progressed to also taking the highly targeted and personalized advertising coupled with mass surveillance and even the idea of precrime that is now being built around AI as if that is more accurate than the fantastical psychics of the movie. Just another example of us creating the torment nexus.
Philip K Dick was a genius, and this story was from the 70s!
About 4 years ago I was at a VC pitch day and one of the teams rehearsing their pitch before hand was basically proposing this for augmented reality. I was mildly horrified that people saw that sort of thing as something people would want, but hey - $$$ is all that matters right? I really hope those folks never got funded.
Why do you think Meta bought VR tech and took it further? To pour ads directly into our brains. It's just that scuba sized VR tech it didn't catch on, so instead they invested in Luxottica now to make AR fashion items with the same purpose.
Creating fake personal memories with faked personal photos and product placements?
I can see it now. You get an ad showing you in prison. The text reads, “I shouldn’t have downloaded that torrent without NordVPN.”
Welcome to our new dystopian hellscape.
This sounds like hell.
Standard internet outrage bait. There are no ads in the photos. The person uploaded their photo to Meta AI's "imagine me" feature which generates photos of you in exotic situations, and now the company is...putting them in exotic situations. That's literally what it is for.
It's technically opt-in. You have to use their image generator, which requires agreeing to this "images appear in your feed randomly" feature implicitly. [0] You think you're just generating 1 photo, but you're actually signing up to a service that generates photos and adds them to your instagram feed. Even their help docs don't mention that nuance though. [1] It's not technically an ad, even though it mostly functions like one since the purpose of these images isn't anything more than bait to get the user to use meta ai more... I guess.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-face-images-instagra...
[1] https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/imagine/?s...
Either I'm crazy or everyone else here is.
"I asked Meta AI for photos of myself and it started advertising Meta AI by showing me photos of myself."
How does this "function like" an ad? Why are we even using the word ad? This is not how ads work. By this definition what isn't an ad?
These are newly generated images, not promoted by you, shown in your feed. That’s the true “service” on offer here, images are generated for you and put on your timeline.
But the UI to sign up for this service looks like a “type in the text box, get an image” sort of service. It also doesn’t mention this instagram integration, other than requiring you to log in with a meta account.
You still get to make your own promoted images, so that’s marginally useful.
The main weirdness is it making its own images, on your behalf.
If you get value from random slop images with no particular theme, then cool. You can look at them as they show up.
But really, these are just throw away assets. It’s just meant to get you to click thru into the meta.ai upsell this links to.
It’s not quite an ad… because technically… it did something for you? There’s some implication that this random feed of useless images of you is… valuable. So it’s a service you accidentally walk into using, that just happens to redirect you to meta.ai when you click on it.
It's absolutely still an ad; ads sometimes include samples, like when they hand out small bites in the supermarket, those might be tasty ads, but they are still ads.
It's not an ad. It's someone trying to figure out what to do with the crap ton of GPUs they've been allocated and told to find some way to show metrics for usage going up, up, up, and the only way they can think to accomplish that is to get people to use them with zero interaction, since basically nobody cares to engage with the features otherwise.
Gotta say, this first batch of released AI features for the masses has been deeply underwhelming. Custom emojis and random pictures of me in random situations in some feed where the only reason I'm not scrolling past it is that it's a picture of me I don't remember being in hardly seems worth the valuations the stock market has been giving these things.
I suspect that if there was a way to clean up the metrics to see only what people actually wanted to engage with with these AI products, it would pop the bubble instantly. So much gaming the metrics by forcing it on people then claiming victory for the AI.
(I don't use LLMs for coding but at least that has a very clear value proposition. Search is nice now, but mostly because conventional search was ruined with malice aforethought... search AIs will follow soon enough. Enjoy that honeymoon while you can.)
It is still weird. Imagine you try out Photoshop online with your private photos. A few minutes later, you start seeing ads with those same photos edited in different ways. Even if those ads are visible only to you, it will still feel pretty creepy.
No, the person uploaded their photo to Meta AI to get a picture with some background, once. They then started seeing ads for MetaAI offering to generate more images of them, for a cost. Only the ads were still using their face from the photo they only uploaded once.
This is like using an online photo editing tool once, and then seeing ads to that photo editing tool show up on the internet, still using the image you up loaded that one time.
Except the ads don't show up anywhere "on the internet", they only show up on the photo editing site.
The photo editing site was "MetaAI", the display site was Instagram.
They may have the same parent, but are distinct entities.
There’s no cost to generate more images.
There's no cost to watch other shows on HBO, but the 2 minute promo they play for a different HBO show before playing the show you requested is 100% an ad.
Fine if you call it an ad, but it doesn’t change the fact that the feature is free of cost.
Also, their support pages say that this can be turned off:
> You can turn this feature off and delete your setup photos in Meta AI settings at any time.
https://m.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1108543930466238
Standard hackernews top comment dismissal.
I’ve developed a habbit of automatically downvoting the top comment on most popular submissions because more often than not they are always some knee-jerk, often stupid contrarian reaction to the submission.
I don’t know when this trend started but I don’t remember it being this bad in the past.
People have been complaining about this for over a decade now. Here's some comments by pg himself, on the "middlebrow dismissal":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397542
I guess a knee-jerk reaction demands a knee-jerk response?
[flagged]
To be fair to them, no one's proven them wrong yet.
Or some of us have opinions that are complex enough to both despise Meta and think that this post is poorly framed.
Yes,
but putting that aside meta does give themself the right to use your face for ads and has used it and has won law suites about it before (through the cases I was aware of are quite old, i.e. before various right to be forgotten laws or GDPR).
So if they want to use your face to create an bot account to "increase engagement" they probably can do so without (legal) repercussions.
[dead]
Yeah not seeing it either, both images say, only you can see this..
Feels more like it generated more than the user asked for and now it’s just showing those images in their feed.
What nobody mentions about "only you can see this" is that "you" refers to ordinary users of the service and there is no mention if employees are included in that grouping. It has happened before that systems secure from the public were misused by persons with privileges within the organization.
The obvious response is "well, yeah. So? They need it." but that's not how ordinary people, who don't deal with this daily, think. When they see "only you can see this" I think they take it literally.
The computer is always watching and sometimes so are the people running the computers.
That's... not an ad? User used Meta AI to touch up a selfie, now Meta AI is generating more selfies for you.
I can understand the annoyance from cross-linking apps in the same way it's annoying to get the Threads popup in your feed, but really, this is utter clickbait.
kind of an interesting question -- are product nudges ads? like when there's a button to use a paid feature which pops up on top of a different button, is it an ad? it's not third party.
You'd call it an ad if you saw it in any other context, so yes.
The definition of "ad" depends on context though (that's the point).
I’m sure the advertising industry has a specific term and definition for this type of ad.
On that basis, I think it falls squarely in the advertising category.
I’m sure someone that works in that industry can drop their knowledge on it.
When a TV network airs promos for its own shows, is it an ad?
I remember being utterly baffled by this as a kid at other peoples houses. "Let me get this straight, you pay a bunch of money for 'special' TV channels that say they have no ads, and you still have to watch ads? What kind of insane horseshit is this?".
Put me off non free to air TV for my entire adult life until streaming services became a thing, and you better believe I'm immediately unsubscribing from those the second they pause a video I'm watching to show me promos or ads.
Yes.
I mean it really is an ad, just an ad for one of Meta’s own products. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is quite literally an ad where one team is winning the ad auction to place these into the feed.
It's only a matter of time before this gets put into the programmatic ad formats where you can do individual level targeting. The advertiser won't ever have to see your image as meta will offer it as a service. More importantly, just like things like pmax (google's current optimization product), your account manager will heavily incentive you towards running these AI campaigns.
That sounds horrible, I hope we prevent this before seeing the negative impacts!
Honestly, what do you think the odds are of that happening?
I'll play some defence for them here. You were playing with Meta's AI face tool, and now it's taken some results from that and swapped them in where ads would usually go. I'm assuming they don't do this if you just uploaded photos to Facebook/Instagram, you seemingly gave them a picture with the direct intent of them using it to make AI images.
It doesn't seem that much different from when I'm typing a chat reply in Snapchat and it starts automatically suggesting stickers with mine and my friends' faces doing silly things with cartoon bodies. Or using my avatar to try and upsell me to their premium subscription. Don't give them a picture of your face to mess around with if you don't like them messing around using a picture of your face.
I suspect the eventual goal is to get citizens to train their own AI avatars, and then those avatars will be used to market to the citizens, to do market research, product research, manipulate politicians, etc. Will you click through letting them do what they want with an AI simulation of you? It starts with a photo. The "next big thing" is agents they say, a personal AI that you train to do things for you. And which incidentally builds an AI simulation of you, the ultimate training data for large models. You are the (AI training) product.
> Don't give them a picture of your face to mess around with if you don't like them messing around using a picture of your face.
OK. In fact, I'll do better than that. I won't interact with any of their products or services in any way, including blocking all their domains several times over in various browser extensions.
Snapchat, too.
Actually I used my time machine to implement it already.
How much surreal harassment will you people put up with?
Apparently, a whole lot more.
I recently had someone stunned (actually, truly stunned) that I didn’t have Instagram.
I spent 5 minutes looking at it years ago, and deleted it - and have never regretted that decision.
Notably, I’m also unsurprisingly no fun at parties.
I instantly revoked Facebook's access to my photos a few years back, when it had taken photos from my camera roll and put it into my feed with a "do you want to share this"? I was browsing on the subway, and did not expect a medical picture of me showing up for everyone there to see. And I realized facebook as well could do what they wanted with my pictures.
Meta AI asks permission to do this, but note that in some U.S. states personal publicity rights end upon death. Isn't it hilariously Wallacian that this technology can be used to make targeted ads featuring the viewers deceased loved ones?
I think the common wisdom is that if you use a Meta product, they will try every possible form of social engineering to drive engagement.
While this example was unexpected, it was predicted (Minority Report et al.) and is very much in line with their MO.
I'd say this is common wisdom on sites like HN, very much not outside the tech bubble. I can immediately bring to mind a good number of non-tech family members who would be completely freaked out by this.
Or perhaps, they could find it entertaining. Particularly if they're comfortable consuming Meta services.
My mom uses Instagram constantly but when she got hit with this she freaked out and said “fuck Facebook” out loud in public and put her phone away.
There is an interesting phenomenon going on here. On one hand, this is pretty mundane: a software tool you’re currently using shows you examples of ways to use the software. On the other hand, this does technically constitute an “ad”.
What’s interesting to me is that some people seem to have a strong emotional reaction to the fact that it’s possible to describe this as “Instagram using my face in an ad,” even if the underlying event lacks the characteristics that would make that statement outrageous.
It's not mundane. The screenshots show Instagram displaying an ad for Meta AI. The user is not currently using MetaAI, they are using Instagram, so it's not at all "showing examples of ways to use the software you are currently using".
It's more similar to Windows trying to sell you OneDrive through the Security Center, which is widely loathed, and recognized as an ad.
> It's not mundane. The screenshots show Instagram displaying an ad for Meta AI.
Well, there it is again: what seems to make it objectionable is that it fits a certain definition, rather than it exhibiting some intrinsically objectionable features. (Note I’m not criticizing this; I just find it interesting.)
Since I don’t personally see this as an ad, I might describe it as “The screenshots show an example of output that the user can generate with Meta AI. The example shown isn’t emotionally enagaging, and it resembles placeholder content.”
What would make this stand out for me is if Meta owned a tooth whitening business, and then used this placement to show a version of myself with a whiter smile. Or any of the other dystopian examples in this thread. But the one that actually occurred just doesn’t register for me as a breach of trust.
"It's an ad" is shorthand for "this is trying to manipulate me to do/buy something". So the problem is not that it fits the definition of "ad", the problem, spelled out completely, is that they are using my likeness in something that is trying to manipulate me to do or buy something (do, in this case, since as far as others are saying, this is free of charge).
Also, while the example shown does resemble placeholder content, it pretty clearly seems designed to evoke an emotional response, it seems designed to appear cool and futuristic.
And regardless, people have a very high sensitivity to how their image is used. If I haven't given Instagram specific permission to use my image for something, it really really can't use my image for that thing. This goes beyond issues like copyright, it's a very basic human right to control how your own likeness is used.
> Imagine yourself reflecting on life in an endless maze of mirrors where you're the main focus.
This feels almost a bit too on-the-nose. But no, apparently it's real?
The idea is kind of interesting, but who from Meta thought this would be cool to do such thing ?
Some growth team probably has goal to move a metric. This promotion is one of their experiments. If they move the metric, they can cite that in their performance review. If the promotion causes bad PR (see this thread) and none of the pre-launch reviews flagged it, they can then share what they learned with others in the company. They will say something like “lead a cross functional team to develop best practices for use of AI-generated pictures of a user in promotions” in their pronounce review.
Either way, we get experimented on like lab rates and they get their bonus.
Agree with your sentiment, but I'd take it one step further: why doesn't anyone calling the shots at Meta realize just how uncool it is to do such a thing? Which is the same reaction I had to their recent AI influencers.
It speaks to their seeming inability to read the zeitgeist on the general public's attitude towards generative AI at the moment. I'm generally "pro AI", in that I think generative AI is incredibly interesting tech that can potentially be used to create some very cool (and maybe even helpful) things. But "AI" has become a dirty word among the people I know who aren't living in our tech bubble - uncool at best, and evil at worst.
And every time I see something like this, I understand perfectly why they feel that way. Every new hamfisted or creepy attempt at inserting AI into everything by companies like Meta just digs the hole even deeper for people's perception of generative AI.
In an old-school yay internet sense, it's fun like amusement park rides taking your photo. But in a modern sense, it's just creepy.
I wonder that in regards to just about everything they do.
The content of the ad seems a bit on-the-nose given how much of Instagram is devoted to onanistic preening...
but its not an ad though? its meta-ai doing meta-ai things.
Like if it was "buy this shit", or "your next location sponsored by bud lite" then yeah, but its not an advert.
They're on the edge with the phrase "Imagined for you" but this is an ad - for their model, using their users faces if they happen to not opt-out.
They did sent mails out last May for instagram (and fb iirc too) in the EU saying you can opt-out of processing in their AI 'improvements'. It was done by filling out a form where you had to tell in a few words why you don't want to participate. Acc. to the message changes came into place on 26th June 2024.
> "(...) we will now rely on a legal basis called legitimate interests to use your data and to develop and improve AI on Meta's services. This means that you have the right to object to the way your data is used for this purpose. If your objection is recognised, it will automatically be recognised in the future."
I'd say it's like you'd develop your photos at the workshop where they say they can randomly use their clients photos in ads in your local papers or whatever. And then you do bump on a poster of your local travel agency including yourself lying on the beach in Saint-Tropez/France slapped all over the city. Where of course you haven't been to France at all.
No, the user had to have already used Meta AI for Meta to have their data to generate additional images. They aren’t taking a random photo from your reel and using that to create an ai version of it. There’s a whole process to image your face that this poster had to go through.
Hence the bit in the title: “Used Meta AI to edit a selfie, now instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me.”
"buy this shit" and "use this shit we made" is still an advert. Just because the person receiving the advert doesn't pay for the product themselves via cash and instead is paying via their personal data doesn't mean the post is not advertisement.
The post is literally advertising MetaAI's product??? Do you know what an advert's definition is?
When I saw the original link on bluesky, I didn't have time to look into it, I had assumed it was something like a post where a sponsor had paid meta to show a user a picture of said user in one of their adverts. Ie meta was being paid to whore out your likeness.
> Do you know what an advert's definition is?
according to this: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/advertisement its not.
Look, I don't like meta any more than you do. But this is a service that is provided by them. Its not an advert, meta aren't making money from generating that user's likeness, or any other.
I don't like GenAI, its going to ruin an industry I love, one I wanted to return to. When the bubble pops, its probably going to make me loose my job too. But this isn't an advert.
I'd like to see the "imagine what you'd look like if you exercised a lot more" or "had better posture" or "spent all summer in the sun" filters.
That's the end of my account, then.
I recently opted out of Meta’s AI, I’m not sure if this helps.
> Object to Your Information Being Used for AI at Meta
Jesus Christ the victim blaming in this thread is insane. This is why deepfake laws are needed. Sure OP used Meta AI, and consented, but if I did that I'd probably be consenting to using the picture _for that one session_, where I'm in control. Definitely not for this, they shouldn't be able to put this in their ToS.
Absolutely. The public doesn’t care what word games you play or what rights you allocate yourself in a terms of service if you pull off something shady you deserve all the bad publicity you get
> but if I did that I'd probably be consenting to using the picture _for that one session_, where I'm in control.
You mean you you'd be wanting to consent to one session, while actually affirmatively consenting to something else. On one hand I agree there would be nothing wrong with limiting the scope of what is legally allowed in a ToS. On the other, I also think it's good that single parties can't just spontaneously wish away conditions of business agreements they don't like (although I imagine with a modicum of effort, you could modify that consent with Meta at any point).
There's a comment in the reddit thread about how consent to Meta is invalid because Meta is essential to participating in modern society - basically saying that being a Meta user is a civil right. Bonkers.
> You mean you you'd be wanting to consent to one session, while actually affirmatively consenting to something else.
Valid consent requires knowing what you're consenting to. This is not a new principle.
Companies need to be reminded that their operation is subject to our own ToS, the law, and it supercedes theirs. We can change it at any time and the sycophants defending any legal behavior aren't winning any favors. The behavior you see on HN playing defense for violations of privacy is disgusting, but I'm glad it's out in the open for everyone to see how far they'll go.
Welcome to Humans 3.0
I don't think it's victim blaming to say that the linked Reddit post is missing critical details (and indeed any details) about what precisely is going on. I agree that it's quite bad if Meta did this without the user specifically asking them to do so.
What better way to increase the hyperreality needed to sell products then to have you in the ad! But also this is HN, so someone needs tk lecture you on “what you mean” and also remind you it’s their product you used and signed up for and signed your rights away too so it’s YOUR fault, or some such pompous condescending trash. I say, lucky you! I say, embrace the future! I say, plaster my face on adult diaper ads and sell them to me. I say, slap my face on that TRT ad from my podcast that I listen to in my lonely apartment to feel a connection to the world while I write code that “matters”. It’s a beautiful world.
just a reminder that you are the product.
Sorry to read this, it is frustrating to see our own face in feeds targeted at us. No clue who thought that would be a win.
Facebook is doing a public service here by being overt.
Anyone else would just quietly take your face and those of your contacts and use it to generate an endless stream of faces which are unambiguously not you, yet compellingly familiar.
...maximizing their brainwashing effectiveness while minimizing the ick factor and triggering privacy minding behaviors.
A lot of harm is done in the world by parties adaptively keeping their invasive conduct at just below the level which will trigger retaliation, legislation, etc. Like databrokers will sell exceptionally private data to anyone with a few bucks, but it's only a 'data breach' when someone takes that data without paying. The existence of databreaches even provides nice plausible deniability for harms that arise from the business of privacy-invasion-for-profit.
I really hate ai generated images of real people. If we thought Photoshop was bad for body image issues this is like putting that effect on heroin. I hope there's a massive backlash against this AI shit tbh. Leave it to meta to find a psychologically toxic application for any given technology.
wait until they generate your, possibly long dead, grandmother (just using information of your and your parents faces and voices) convincing you to try that brand of pies.
There is the theory that all men are deeply, possibly unconsciously, sexually attracted to their mother. Which leads to the obvious AI generated porn.
That is an entirely different definition of pie than I’m comfortable considering.
Things that feel illegal will probably become illegal someday, but they think it's fine because, for now, it's not illegal.
> will probably become illegal someday
Probably not for four years, at least
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
-Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt
Nah. Street View was also a big hubbub back then. People are not even mentioning it anymore.
>Things that feel illegal will probably become illegal someday
Also, if you think about this phrasing for just a second, this is the chilling effect. Suppressing expression due to the anticipation of negative outcomes.
> Nah. Street View was also a big hubbub back then. People are not even mentioning it anymore.
Didn't StreetView start blurring people when they ask? Seems like people don't mention it anymore because the privacy issue was mitigated.
Some was mitigated, but I don't think that faces and plates were what had the biggest bang about it. It's a complete, 360 capture of a large part of public places, with people still being clearly identifiable, correlated with satellite imagery (which was pointed out as creepy and privacy-invading as well, upon its public release), resolution so high that you can read many texts, and you can still see in windows, into yards, all kinds of stuff. Wikipedia has a lengthy article about the different concerns. And yet, despite it feeling creepy and strange for many, it just became normal. People look up random places for fun, to hunt for their new home, for driving instructions, GeoGuessr is cool and has a league of its own... it's a creepy, risky new thing becoming part of life, that's why I brought it up.
Smartphones could be another good example. As the joke goes, people in the 60s are afraid the government wiretaps their phones. Nowadays, they say: "Hey wiretap! Do you have a recipe for pancakes?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_privacy_con...
That is the difference in the U.S. businesses vs. European.
In Europe many companies think ethics even if is not illegal on paper.
In the U.S. you need to get big before it is illegal, lobby for it and then pay fines. But fines are okay since you got big already.
All the hate tech journalists gave the EU because Apple Intelligence isn't launched there was insane, yet this is what EU legislation is designed to avoid.
You must be joking right. This euro-superior tone that always pops up on here is delusional.
Nestle. Shell Oil. I can go on... literally nothing about what you said is grounded in reality.
I didn't know that nestle and shell had AI departments.
Look, I'm not +1 the EU here, but having some level of legal protection against marauding corporations is good. Sure EU based companies are evil, but they can't be as abusive to normal people because they are constrained by a semi-functional legal system.
The US used to have that as well, along with a functioning legislature.
They do not. I can't even begin to explain to you how delusional this is.
To be clear, I gave testimony to the NTHSA that the first Porsche Taycan was unfit for road driving due to extreme errors in the software architecture and in part got the CEO of Porsche fired. (Specifically error handling so laughably bad it caused the entire car to lock up at speed.)
The EU only FOLLOWED grudgingly after the US demanded the recall. I am extremely aware of EXACTLY how risk-taking European companies are.
I am not joking.
”Move fast and break things” was even the motto of Zuckerberg back in day in Facebook. There are studies about it.
Even Y Combinator has some history of admitting that they seek people like that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2579990
I particularly meant tech companies. Of course, you can find unethical businesses everywhere.
Im sorry, I feel like you just countered with one of the most obvious statements in this field.
SAP, Claude etc are all doing the same things American counterparts do. You need a slight dose of reality.
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This isn't helpful or realistic. It's becoming more and more difficult to keep all your personal data private and function in society, which is all by design for companies like Meta.
Posting on social networks can easily be seen as counterproductive to societal function these days.
You’ve posted enough info here on HN for anyone to dox you (I won’t). Just thought it was relevant to your comment.
Exactly, and the OP is not bothered about the content that is around him, somehow for him that must have been generated from thin air.
People are not born with knowledge, however trivial it seem after knowing it. Same thing with privilege: different perspectives are earned with experience, not something that we start with.
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> These are not ads, rather something that is generated natively by the platform, not leading anywhere else but the platform that the user is already on.
Is this post Advertising a product? Yes, it is advertising a MetaAI product. Just because it's not an external ad, doesn't mean it's not an ad. Hulu shows me adds for other Hulu shows. This is an ad despite me not leaving that streaming site.
What is an advertisement to you?
You are right, that is still and ad. Platform ads are really common for anyone running their own ad exchange. Sometimes its just to use up supply, other times its to meet in house goals.
This is technically true, these are advertisements. But not what first come to mind when reading the title "Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me", which would be third-party ads, so this is my point. The title is sensational, a play on this misunderstanding, rather than being substantial.
My ick levels are about the same whether it’s used by third parties or just Meta. It’s a mega corporation using my likeness to manipulate my behavior for their own ends.
When someone signs up for facebook they are agreeing that any image they upload is something they are explicitly granting them permission to use. Where's the "ick"? They already gave them permission, whether they read the fine print or not.
well, a properly sensationalized title for your case would be 'Instagram and facebook are giving my pictures away to advertisers for use'.
Still semi-sensational but more direct to your posit.
No one said third-party ads, the description is perfectly accurate to what is happening. The knee jerk reaction to call it sensationalist is odd to me.
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To help with understanding my point, I edited the original comment, and noted the edit.
You edited to claim that "ad" is commonly understood to mean "3rd party ad", when in fact that is not true, and it's irrelevant either way. The idea of using my likeness in ads is disgusting, and likely illegal, even if they are first party ads.
Agreed that '3rd party ad' is a weird qualifier.
For starters, what's '3rd party'? I remember when Google-Fi or whatever it was had the poorly animated, jingle sung-by-a 'totally not trying to cop Randy Newman vibe' ads. Would that be a 3rd party in that case?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising
> Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages and qualities of interest to consumers.
Nobody ever said that advertising must involve a third party.
I feel like advertisements are on a spectrum, and that (let's call them) "first party" advertisements are not what come to people's minds, when they read a title like "Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me". I'd like to prove this point by the following image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=instagram+ads&iax=images&ia... . The top results all relate to advertise something on Instagram that is not Meta-related - so, third party ads.
Lol, literally calling an ad by meta not an ad. If they do it for Meta, the next logical step. This is from the same company that wanted to create official bots that would post, comment, react. Meta at this point is just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks as a product. I am not afraid of my data being stolen, but it is a wake up call for what to expect.
>Meta at this point is just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks
I feel the very same from the OP reddit submission. OP used Meta AI, and then Meta AI used it for more Meta AI. I'm sorry but this is a far cry from "Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me". The implications of this title, and the situation it describes differ greatly. For example, if the user used Meta AI, and then got an ad of themselves driving a car, drinking a coffee, wearing some clothing, and the ad would be about that product itself, then I would have not made the original comment at all.
You're fighting way harder on this than I would, but I do agree that the title had me imagining being served an ad where I'm using the product being sold to me. Ads already are trying to make you think you'd be happy or popular by using their product by showing you people acting like that. It kicks that up to another level to literally see yourself happy because you're using a product that someone wants to sell you.
> These are not ads, rather something that is generated natively by the platform, not leading anywhere else but the platform that the user is already on
So if Instagram shows you ads about Meta AI, it doesn't count as ads because both are owned by Meta?
Yes, in my mind, just saying "ads" are more for like Nike or Hyundai, than for a service provider upselling its own products. But this point is technically valid, these are advertisements as well. Just not what I, or others, first think of when they read "Instagram is using my face on ads".
If you go into a Hyundai dealer and see a big banner about their new financing plan, isn’t that an ad?
If the Nike catalog includes a full page promo for nike.com, isn’t that an ad?
Yes, it's an ad.
My point is, and I even edited the original comment so that it comes across better: "ads on instagram" implies third party ads much more, than fist party upsells. Another example is "Ads in Windows". The popup for OneDrive is much less egregious than Candy Crush, or tabloid news in the Start Menu. This is because, while the user asked for neither, some consent was already given for the first party, while no consent was given to the third party.
You rewrote your comment not to come across better but to make a different point.
Your point was that this wasn’t an ad. Your point now is that you personally feel “ad” doesn’t typically mean first party ads.
The former is wrong, the latter an opinion.
What you call an opinion is not my original point, and even if so, I don't understand what you are trying to say. Shouldn't I have expressed an opinion here?
Editing a comment so substantially that your thesis changes makes you look deeply disingenuous.
I’ve come down this far and can co-sign this comment. Holy canoli.
Thank you for your feedback. I'll strive to come across better the first time in the future.
I really don't see a difference between upsell and 3rd party ads. I stopped using Evernote (was a paying subscriber) because I got annoyed by constantly having ads for their other services shoved in my face.
But Meta AI is not Instagram, so it’s not even first party?
The user gave their picture to Meta AI in Instagram previously, and Meta AI and Instagram have the same parent company, and the user also encountered the advertisement on Instagram. This is as first party as it gets, in my Hacker News submissions. Maybe not in legal language.
This is just rationalization, everything the post said is 100% correct and the users are unhappy about it justifiably.
They are an Instagram post that is shown to make you buy something, not because anyone you follow posted it. So, it's an ad. The fact that they're using your face in a Meta ad doesn't make it any different from any other ad.
You're probably thinking about this as not a problem from a privacy perspective, and you may be right that this is not technically a privacy issue. But it's still a huge problem from a psychological influence perspective. Ads are already extremely good at manipulating your psyche, adding the ability to show you personally in some wonderful situations that their product would apparently put you in is a whole other level in manipulation.
Plus, if this gets normalized, the next step is absolutely going to be to sell this as a new type of ad to other brands (assuming people end up interacting with such ads more).
Edit to say: thinking about it, I actually think it's a privacy violation even for a Meta ad. Giving them permission to use an image of my face to generate a better selfie doesn't give them permission to use it to serve me ads. The GDPR is pretty specific about this: when you opt into sharing personal data for a specific purpose, that has to be interpreted in a narrow sense, you can't arbitrarily broaden the scope.
Imagine the ozempic ads that use your real face on a thinner body.
If you can then use those ozempic images for your own use, then I bet a bunch of people would be quite happy with it.
I'd bet that this would be a bridge too far for many people, even the newer generations. People want to control how their likeness is used, many are not even happy to appear in their friends' pictures (at least to get tagged) unless they like the result and are asked before hand.
That seems like a strange conclusion with the extravagant use of heavy filtering so that nobody actually looks like what their social presence implies.
They just need to tweaking the marketing and release it as a filter, but then include weasel words text that says anything used by the filter allows for them to selectively choose images to use as marketing. Essentially reversing the flow with sneaky consent
I'm with you. If I am at a bar and I see a sign that says "PBR - $3", I don't think of that as an advertisement. This user opted into Meta AI and (perhaps 'unknowingly' as no one reads the terms) gave their consent for this to happen, so I think 'hysteria' is appropriate and it's clear to me that here in the comments, opinions about this are based on feelings and not facts, and for that reason, it has to be described in misleading ways.
I, too, have "used Meta AI", and have not had this happen to me. But I did not use Meta AI to generate pictures of me, so I did not check the box that led to this. That is one of the number of ways the way this post is titled in a way that is misleading. Simply "using Meta AI" in any capacity did not lead to this outcome.
Additionally, the title suggests that the user gave his photos to Meta AI, and then a separate service, Instagram, is using his photos. That's not what is happening, he gave his photos to Meta AI (likely inside Instagram) and then Meta AI is using them (inside Instagram). There's no need to pretend two different services are sharing their photos around, but the post title is more engaging if there's the suggestion otherwise.
When I worked as a waiter, we were supposed to tell the customers about the drink / appetizer specials before taking orders. This dialogue was in fact advertising as those were the high margin offerings at every restaurant.
In any case I think it's more analogous to ads for tv shows while you're trying to watch a tv show. The media you want to consume (news feed) has ads interjected in it, in order to get you to spend more time consuming more content.
Not really. OP was already an Instagram and Meta AI user. So, in the TV analogy, this would be like telling you about an upcoming programme, while you are watching a channel.
I fully agree. There is a lot, a wide spectrum of abuse that Meta can be attacked for, and this little thing is not one of them. I think this is why I feel so personal about this - I do dislike Meta a lot, but I like it when people roast it for the actually valid reasons. I'm sorry for the downvotes, and appreciate your support.
If Instagram shows you an old post with a picture thats got a filter on, or grouped some of your pictures together into a frame, saying "look back on your memories and repost" is that an advert?
When your post comes up in the explore page of another user, is that an advert?
what about those stupid "Here is a post from your friends on threads" with most of the stuff cropped off, as soon as you try and click it, its loads the fucking app store?
Meta have done some terrible shit, but this isn't up there. Its not even a mili-cambridge analyitica. (or a pico-myanmar) its just a shitty app in their shitty social network.
It seems like we are just hipster-hate yak shaving on something pointless, and missing the much wider point that the US needs decent data protections laws, and a functioning legislature.
Your examples are not ads, because they are not trying to convince you to buy anything, or even to give Instagram/Meta any more data about yourself. Advertising a completely separate Meta business (Meta AI is not Instagram) is an entirely different thing.
This ad is also nothing what you describe - the user was already a Meta AI user. From the title: "Used Meta AI, now Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me". So what happened is that Meta AI did a few extra easy image manipulations, and showed it to its user, on the same platform nonetheless, not even on Facebook or something.
We don't know some of this. MetaAI can be used independently of Instagram, I believe, so I don't know if it's certain that the user used it through Instagram. Also, don't they have a paid tier that they are likely trying to get them to upgrade to?
> Also, don't they have a paid tier that they are likely trying to get them to upgrade to?
no.
> Meta business (Meta AI is not Instagram)
Isn't threads a separate "business"?
I fully agree. The reddit post is a nothingburger. It feels like it's more about someone wanting to express themselves, or fish for something that might worth good feedback, than someone who actually has something worthwhile to say.
The actual good that this thing has is some feedback for people, to think about whether they want to use these platforms, or not. Being conscious about stuff like these is what I think does good to the world, and the well-being of people.
Any complaint that starts with "used meta..." just loses me. It's like, I stuck this needle into my left testicle and now that testicle hurts.
For starters, how is it not a violation (eg. "personality rights") to use a person's likeness without permission?
As a further example, do we really want insurance companies serving ads using near and dear ones as potential disaster victims? This is really getting out of hand.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but this is kinda cool! As long as the user data doesn't leave the Meta ecosystem (no reason to think it does right now, the ad in question here is from Meta itself), it's not a privacy concern since only you are being shown those unique ads with you in them.
Even if other advertisers start using the system, as long as the generated resulting images are never shared with the advertisers and are unique to each user, its just a futuristic way to help you "imagine" what having XYZ product would be like, which is what most ads strive to do.
People have knee-jerk reactions to anything to do with ads because of the privacy concerns of yesterday, understandably. But if you actually step back and think about this, there's no reduction in privacy that I can see. If people are creeped out by it, I think they should maybe let people disable them with a setting.
But in general, making ads more effective without giving advertisers more data about us is a great thing for the continuation of free amazing internet services!
Man, I absolutely cannot disagree more. If a service wants to use my face in an ad they need to ask me for permission first. The gradual erosion of user autonomy we’ve seen online over the past few decades never ceases to amaze me.
> People have knee-jerk reactions to anything to do with ads because of the privacy concerns of yesterday, understandably.
Can you elaborate on this? What were the privacy concerns of yesterday that we don’t need to worry about today?
> If a service wants to use my face in an ad they need to ask me for permission first.
But you granted us full unrestricted access when you agreed to page 58 section J of our latest terms of service. - meta lawyer somewhere
It's an ad only you can see, I don't see the harm.
> What were the privacy concerns of yesterday that we don’t need to worry about today?
The web/internet is a hell of a lot more private today than 10 years ago. Third party cookies are basically gone, mobile tracking is going out the door with Apple leading that charge, there are tons of relatively popular browsers and extensions that reduce tracking even more, there's enough privacy legislation that big companies have had to re-architect to preserve privacy as much as possible by default.
Hell, if we're just talking about Meta, they literally nuked a thriving third-party developer API ecosystem to appease people's privacy concerns, out right.
There were times when users warned about the consequences of putting your images on the net. If you upload them on Facebook services, you gave away the rights on them I believe.
If they use your picture to advertise to your friends, showing you in a nike shoe or whatever, that's still okay? It still wouldn't have left the Meta ecosystem.
They might create an AI-generated person who closely resembles your friend but not exactly. If they do it undetected, it could have a massive impact. Imagine an ad featuring someone who looks just like your crush. I really hope this gets banned before anyone tries it.
This scenario reminds me of Amazon Prime’s Live TV with hyper-targeted advertising. A friend who has it noticed that his ads revealed what he and his wife had browsed on Amazon. It was fun at times to see that we’d all been looking at the same items, but it also felt a bit too personal. Now he never turn on his TV whenever guests visit.
No, because that would be sharing your photo and not unique to you as a user. I also don't really see why anyone would want to do that...
As much as I loathe ads, I actually agree with you. I think these are good points. Among others, it's a very important realization that just by properly using these services, so much of the privacy has been given up already. It's just that services are clever about this, same as how corrupt populists: they do the damage, but keep away the negative feedback as much as they can, hiding, delaying, projecting, doesn't matter, as long as people don't feel it.
This is why this ad seems outrageous: it provides this feedback. Demonstrates just a little bit of the power that they have over the person. So the user immediately sobered up, maybe even vowed something to the opposite.
I think you all pro-AI clusters should face the fact straight that people hate AI generated images.
AI as an art style evokes primal hate and rage. If you show images to people that are linked to such set of emotions, such set of emotions arise among audiences. As demonstrated.
This tendency of current AI image generators needs to be fixed before AI image generators could be used to create positive impacts.
> But in general, making ads more effective without giving advertisers more data about us is a great thing for the continuation of free amazing internet services!
Too right! Sure, Facebook may have facilitated multiple ethnic cleansings around the world, but its a small price to pay to facilitate a dystopian future in which tech illiterate, elderly boomers are bombarded with AI generated ads of their own funerals that encourage them to buy life assurance policies...