Should Your Social Media Posts Be Used to Train AI?

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9 Nov 2023

A lot’s happening in the tech world that is worthy of your attention and opinion! We’ve pulled out some of the more recent news in the tech world to gain your insights and opinions on the topics at hand. Head on to the following link to tell us what you think.

Let’s begin!

Meta’s Decision to Train AI Using Posts on Facebook, Instagram

Personally, we don’t even know where to begin with this one.

In its race to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, Meta recently announced the launch of an AI that was trained on publicly available Facebook and Instagram posts.

Meta believes it has right over that content, and has a host of lawyers at the ready to defend its position, but as users of social media, where do YOU fall on the spectrum of letting the company access your data to train its Llama 2 large language model? Does it bother you? Or do you think it’s just a continuation of what the company is good at i.e. profiteering off of users’ data?

Let us know here.

Should Google Decide How It Collects Your Data?

Lawmakers in the US are trying to tighten the noose around Google’s data collection policies, so much so that the company has had it with Congress trying to pass laws that would dictate how the company collects information about users.

In Congress’ case, they’re concerned with data collection of a specific age group: children and teens. This raises some very pertinent questions about whether the company should use data from those age groups to advertise products and services to them.

One of the more radical ideas Congress is toying with is getting Google to verify whether users are actually 18 years and above through an ID card. Google doesn’t like that idea (and rightly so!) but has not offered much beyond an internally devised set of frameworks that US representatives should keep in mind when formulating laws.

This has us wondering: where should users draw the line between privacy and convenience? What novel ways could Google adopt to ethically collect data on children and teenagers? Is the onus of minimizing the harmful effects of social media and the internet on companies like Google, Meta, and others?

Let us know!

Is the Tech Industry Getting Smaller?

Alright, alright. Mergers and acquisitions are a common theme in a thriving economy. You can’t necessarily expect businesses to not merge with each other! But we’ve recently seen some big-name mergers in the industry, not to mention, all the scrambling in the tech industry to snap up promising startups, especially those operating in AI.

\What are the implications of such actions? With tech majors buying up anything and everything, will the tech industry truly see innovation and competition if everything ultimately falls in the hands of a select few?

Let’s hear your thoughts!

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