Your conversations with Meta AI will now shape the ads you see on your Facebook newsfeed.
Meta announced on Wednesday that its recommendation system will soon display ads and suggested content to users based on their interactions with Meta AI, the company’s digital AI assistant with more than one billion monthly active users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Ads will soon be crafted based on conversations with Meta AI via text and audio.
Meta will also use voice recordings, photos, and videos acquired through footage from Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses to create ads. The ads will display on Facebook and Instagram feeds, but will not surface on WhatsApp unless users link their accounts to Instagram or Facebook.
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The new AI-based ads start on December 16 globally, except for Meta users in South Korea, the United Kingdom and the European Union, where laws prohibit companies from this level of data collection. Meta will notify global users of the change earlier, beginning October 7.
The tech giant noted that users cannot opt out — if they want to stop AI-chat-based targeted ads, they have to stop interacting with Meta AI.
Meta explained how the new AI content will be shown in feeds across social media. For example, if a user talks to Meta AI about where to take a vacation, they will receive ads and suggested content on their Facebook and Instagram feeds based on that conversation. They could receive a suggested Instagram Reel about where to travel and ads on their newsfeeds for hotels.
Meta’s Privacy and Data Policy Manager Christy Harris told CNBC during a media briefing that the ad initiative was an expected next step in Meta’s AI strategy — and that people already thought Meta was using AI conversations to tailor ad experiences.
“We want to be super transparent about it and provide a heads up before we actually begin using this data in a new way, even if people already thought that we were doing this,” Harris told the outlet.
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Meta isn’t alone in sharing AI data for other purposes — your ChatGPT conversations aren’t private either. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared on an episode of the “This Past Weekend” podcast in July that, though a growing number of users are relying on ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “life coach,” conversations with the chatbot lack legal protections.
“If you talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff and there’s a lawsuit, we could be required to produce that,” Altman said on the podcast.
Meta’s AI-based ad initiative is part of the company’s ongoing effort to use AI and user data (detailed descriptions of users, their likes, browsing histories, and more) to help sell ads. The company’s revenue almost entirely consists of advertising dollars, with ads accounting for over 97% of Meta’s revenue in 2023 and 2024.
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For its most recent quarterly earnings report, released in July, Meta reported revenue of $47.52 billion, a 22% year-over-year increase. Advertising accounted for $46.56 billion of that total, or about 98%.