Tech
Meta AI comment summaries is turned on in your settings by default: How to turn it off
Artists flee Instagram amid Meta’s plans to train AI with public posts
In May, Meta announced that it has started using publicly available information on their platforms to train its AI, which includes photos from users.
Another day, another AI feature that no one asked for.
Users of Meta products, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, have flocked to forums on Reddit and elsewhere looking for ways to turn specific features off since the company rolled out its AI integration in April.
Users have gathered tips and tricks to silence certain functions, like Meta AI search and chat, but it seems that, at least for now, you cannot simply out of Meta AI entirely.
But even without a universal kill switch, you can still curtail some of the peskier components – including those you may not have even known were turned on by default.
One such feature, called “comment summaries,” does just what it sounds like – creates AI-generated blurbs that summarize the comments sections on posts, attempting to form a concise blurb about commenters’ overall feelings and statements on the parent post’s content.
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USA TODAY has reached out to Meta for clarity on how posts and comments are selected and used in making content summaries. However, Facebook’s Help Center does mention that the function is available for “some Page posts with a large number of comments added to them.”
It also mentions that the Meta AI comment summaries are toggled on by default, prompting privacy concerns from users who do not want what they write online fed into the Meta AI system for machine learning and generation.
Want to opt out of Meta AI comment summaries? Here’s how in a few quick steps.
How to turn off Meta AI comment summaries on Facebook
- Open Facebook and look for the “Account” section. It appears as a circle in the upper right-hand corner with your profile picture. Clicking the circle triggers a dropdown menu to appear.
- Select “Settings & privacy” from the dropdown menu.
- Select “Settings” from the next menu.
- On the sidebar under “Settings & Privacy,” scroll down to “Audience & visibility”
- Select the “Posts” tab under Audience & visibility settings.
- A setting titled “Show comment summaries on posts” will appear with a button automatically toggled to “on.” Click the button to toggle the setting off.
While turning this off may not prevent your content from being used to train Meta AI, it will stop the summaries, which are prone to inaccuracies, from appearing on your feed. Of course, if you want to opt out completely, your best option is to stop using Meta platforms.