Meta Publicly Launches AI Image Generator Trained On Your Facebook, Instagram Photos (venturebeat.com) 28
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Quest VR headsets and creator of leading open source large language model Llama 2 -- is getting into the text-to-image AI generator game. Actually, to clarify: Meta was already in that game via a text-to-image and text-to-sticker generator that was launched within Facebook and Instagram Messengers earlier this year. However, as of this week, the company has launched a standalone text-to-image AI generator service, "Imagine" outside of its messaging platforms. Meta's Imagine now a website you can simply visit and begin generating images from: imagine.meta.com. You'll still need to log in with your Meta or Facebook/Instagram account (I tried Facebook, and it forced me to create a new "Meta account," but hey -- it still worked). [...]
Meta's Imagine service was built on its own AI model called Emu, which was trained on 1.1 billion Facebook and Instagram user photos, as noted by Ars Technica and disclosed in the Emu research paper published by Meta engineers back in September. An earlier report by Reuters noted that Meta excluded private messages and images that were not shared publicly on its services.
When developing Emu, Meta's researchers also fine-tuned it around quality metrics. As they wrote in their paper: "Our key insight is that to effectively perform quality tuning, a surprisingly small amount -- a couple of thousand -- exceptionally high-quality images and associated text is enough to make a significant impact on the aesthetics of the generated images without compromising the generality of the model in terms of visual concepts that can be generated. " Interestingly, despite Meta's vocal support for open source AI, neither Emu nor the Imagine by Meta AI service appear to be open source.
Meta's Imagine service was built on its own AI model called Emu, which was trained on 1.1 billion Facebook and Instagram user photos, as noted by Ars Technica and disclosed in the Emu research paper published by Meta engineers back in September. An earlier report by Reuters noted that Meta excluded private messages and images that were not shared publicly on its services.
When developing Emu, Meta's researchers also fine-tuned it around quality metrics. As they wrote in their paper: "Our key insight is that to effectively perform quality tuning, a surprisingly small amount -- a couple of thousand -- exceptionally high-quality images and associated text is enough to make a significant impact on the aesthetics of the generated images without compromising the generality of the model in terms of visual concepts that can be generated. " Interestingly, despite Meta's vocal support for open source AI, neither Emu nor the Imagine by Meta AI service appear to be open source.
Not available outside of USA? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The same for me. I am in Europe.
Re: (Score:1)
It is also your fault that the cancer called "meta" continues to spread then.
Re: (Score:1)
> despite several exciting wars going on and the horror comedy of the Republican Party.
Wait... you mean handing Ukraine - a country that may not be 100% like us but did nothing to deserve being invaded by Russia - over to Russia isn't an honorable thing to do?
Reminder: those aren't YOUR photos anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
They're Facebook's. You surrendered any right to them when you uploaded them.
In fact, it's not even a Facebook issue: it's been known since the internet became a thing that anything you put online is as good as public. If you don't want disgusting Big Data companies abusing your precious photos, don't give them your photos.
But of course, it's a bit late to think about that now...
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, except Facebook has shadow profiles on you whether or not you ever use their service, based all those "like and share" website widgets. And if a friend of yours uploads a photo with you in it from a party/wedding/whatever, they'll have your face too.
Re: (Score:2)
The shadow profiles are based on data you put out yourself. And again, YOU put out the data on the internet. It's public. Facebook poached public data. Hate them for it, but the onus was on you not to put data out in the public space.
The one issue I totally agree with you on is the group photo thing: it's really a problem that you can't opt out of having your image abused by Big Data when someone else takes it and upload it.
Me, I'm a sad person: I've told friends and family in no uncertain terms that I abso
Re: (Score:2)
I'm with you. I have no social media presence (FB, Twitter, Instagram, all the others, etc.) and have never had them. I upload nothing and maintain my own files. Cloud? Screw your cloud. But given that over 3/4th of the world's population is as smart as a bag of hammers and/or just don't care I don't see big data slowing down on any of their perving until governments force them to do it.
Re:Reminder: those aren't YOUR photos anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
People aren't all stupid. People have other priorities. You and I ruin our lives for the sake of maintaining our privacy in a world that makes this increasingly inconvenient and costly on a personal level. Not everybody is like us and I fully respect that.
People should demand a basic level of privacy (yet most don't, and shame on them for that). But they shouldn't have to fight a totally unfair fight and miss out on so many conveniences for the right to basic privacy. This is 100% not their fault.
As for whether your congresscritters will fight for the good of their constituents, fat chance: most of them are bought and sold on the marketplace, and Big Tech has deeper pockets than you.
Re: Reminder: those aren't YOUR photos anymore (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
"It's in public, everyone can use it" is not a legal principle.
Re: (Score:2)
But I can take pictures of your car and post them to the Internet. That's what's happening with regards to people taking pictures of you in public. Technology is just a bunch of tools that can be used however the user deems necessary.
It's probably impossible to have any real privacy these days given how everything is shared for profit.
Re: (Score:2)
Use of the car may not be public, but if you're in the back seat banging someone and people walk by, that is in the public domain.
Just like walking or driving down the street, if someone can see you, it's public.
Re: (Score:1)
You can never put any personal information online and Facebook can still build an extensive profile on you just from what sites you browse.
Re: (Score:3)
They're Facebook's. You surrendered any right to them when you uploaded them.
Not in any country that obeys the Berne convention. All content is copyrighted by the original creator implicitly upon creation, and assignment of rights has to be extremely explicit. Even granting temporary use of the content requires clear intent, and there's no reason to believe that users do so merely by uploading content to Facebook, at least beyond the very specific purpose for which they uploaded it (e.g. to share with a specific person, group of people, their friends, friends of friends, etc.
The s
Re: (Score:2)
You want to field the Berne convention against a corporation?
Good luck.
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah that's not how it works. In fact that's not how ANYTHING works, unless of course you live in the good old USA.
In EU you can, by law, require that Meta/FB removes _all_ your information including any derivate works.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, yes, we have removed everything. See? Can't see them anymore. So we removed it.
Pinky swear.
Re: (Score:2)
In EU you can, by law
Mmmyeeees. I'm sure Facebook is shaking in their boots at the prospect of EU citizens filing suits against them.
Re: (Score:2)
The average Facebook post seems like an attempt to poison the training data, unless their intent was to create the Racist Uncle Bot or the Barely Literate Conspiracy Nut AI.
Re: (Score:2)
In other words, if they wanted to create the average Facebook power user.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh no not Facebook (Score:2)
The horror, an entire industry uses images from the internet without a license and now Facebook has the gall to actually do it with a contract which allows them to do it. Burn the witch.
no more rayban scams? (Score:2)
Does this mean they'll finally have a bot do what their own humans seem utterly incapable of doing: detecting when there's a rayban scam image that's tagging 300 people?
While they're at it, maybe they can recognize the "i can't believe he's dead" scams that get posted all the time?