Facebook’s new button lets its AI check photos you haven’t yet uploaded

Meta has rolled out an optional AI feature for its Facebook users in the US and Canada that claims to make their photos and videos more “share-worthy.” The only problem is that this feature is designed for your phone’s Camera Roll: not media you have already uploaded to Facebook. If you sign up, Meta’s AI will comb through your camera roll, download your unpublished photos to Meta’s cloud and uncovers “hidden gems” that are “lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps,” the company says. Users will be able to save or share suggested edits and pastes.

If Facebook’s desire to view your previously unseen photos sounds familiar, it might be because we talked about a first test back in June. At that time, the company claimed that unpublished private photos were not used to train Meta’s AI, but it refused to rule out whether it would do so in the future.

Well, the future is now, and it looks like Meta wants to train its AI on your photos – under certain conditions. In Friday’s announcement of the feature, Meta said: “We don’t use media from your camera roll to improve AI at Meta, unless you choose to edit that media with our AI tools or share it.”

The edge asked Meta to confirm: Meta will use your camera roll to train its AI if you choose to use this feature, right? We also requested clarification on When Meta starts using your never-before-seen photos to train its AI. Does this happen when you enable the new feature? After choosing to modify something with the tool? Or only after you choose to share the resulting creation?

Meta spokesperson Mari Melguizo sent us the following clarification: “This means that the camera roll media downloaded by this feature to make suggestions will not be used to improve the AI ​​at Meta. Only if you edit the suggestions with our AI tools or post these suggestions on Facebook can improvements to the AI ​​at Meta be made.”

So Meta will collect and store your photos in the cloud and Meta’s AI can review them, but the company won’t use them to train its AI unless you take an additional action — at least for now, according to Meta. Today, the feature says it will “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis”; in June, Meta told us it might keep some of this data for more than 30 days. The company says your media “will not be used for ad targeting purposes.”

Last year, Meta admitted that it had already quietly trained its AI models on all public photos and texts posted to Facebook and Instagram by adult users since 2007.

Facebook’s blog post today shows that users will be asked if they want to “allow cloud processing to create creative ideas for you from your camera roll.” It’s not yet clear whether this prompt will also warn users that the feature may train Meta’s AI on your photos. The company says this feature is intended to help users who like to take photos but want to enhance their photos before posting them, or who don’t have time to “create something special.” Facebook says it will roll out this feature in the coming months.