All eyes on Facebook as Meta AI launches in Europe
A year after its launch in the United States, Meta AI is finally taking its first, faltering steps in Europe. Launching this month, the in-house artificial intelligence (AI) will now operate in the significantly less free-wheeling environment of the European Union – albeit in cut down form.
The AI is to be launched in all 27 EU member states, as well as 14 other European countries, including Serbia and Britain, plus 21 overseas territories.
Meta AI will initially be integrated into WhatsApp, with its future application into Messenger and Instagram coming “soon”.
Presumably buoyed by the tech industry’s capture of the United States government, Meta is, like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, and the rest, surely confident that it will eventually get its way in Europe. For the moment Meta must adapt its technology to meet regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act), and the Digital Markets Act. Consequently, some features available to US users were disabled to meet local requirements.
In its official press release, Meta lamented deployment in Europe took “longer than we would have liked,” laying the blame directly on Europe’s politicians saying things were difficult for the company “as we continue to navigate its complex regulatory system”.
Meta’s apparent irritation about being forced to obey laws is made all the more wryly amusing by the fact that it has trained its AI on stolen material held in pirated book archive Library Genesis, unredacted court documents have revealed.
Just asking questions
Regulators have taken notice, though. Not only are AIs in general, rightly, subject to increasing scrutiny in Europe, but Meta and the rest of the Facebook empire are viewed with particular suspicion. For a start, scandals such as Cambridge Analytica are fresh in the mind, but the direct integration of AI into apps like WhatsApp and Messenger is itself reason enough for regulators to pay attention, given how deeply these platforms are embedded in the daily lives of millions of users.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), for instance, said it has been examining Meta AI, alongside its fellow EU regulators.
“[I]n terms of WhatsApp, we still have some open questions that require answering and we continue to engage with WhatsApp on these,” said Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner at the DPC, speaking to RTÉ.
There was a time when the complaints these giants of Internet marketing (let’s face it: that is what these outfits are, rather than actual technology companies) made about clueless politicians, ignorant journalists and pettifogging bureaucracy sounded reasonable. In the 1990s basic networked IT may as well have been witchcraft, while the available scholarly literature on what we used to call cybernetics and computer-mediated communication was speculative and tended toward the Pollyannaish.
No more. Today, the nightmare of surveillance capitalism and total extraction of value at any cost is obvious to anyone who cares. True, the marketing blob has indeed won a victory in the US, but that was always a place more hospitable to sharp practice and, frankly, scammers. Europe is different, and long may it stay that way – even if it comes at the cost of falling behind in the rollout of automated text autocorrection, crap ‘painting’, and other broken technologies.
Hopefully we are entering an era in which asking for permission once again becomes the norm, and businesses that instead ask for forgiveness are fired into outer space. Or at least sent back to the US.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers