Meta will record keystrokes made by employees and use it to train its AI models

Meta has found a new source of training data for its AI models: its employees. The company plans to use data derived from its employees’ mouse movements and keystrokes as it seeks to build more capable and efficient artificial intelligence.

The story, first reported by Reuters, shows the lengths to which technology companies will go in finding new sources of training data, the lifeblood of artificial intelligence models that help programs learn how to perform tasks more effectively and respond to user queries.

When reached for comment by TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson provided the following statement:

“If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people do it.” In reality Use it – things like mouse movements, button clicks, and drop-down menu navigation. To help, we’re launching an internal tool that can capture these types of inputs in certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.

This trend seems to reveal the implications of the AI ​​industry’s disturbing privacy, as yesterday’s internal corporate communications increasingly became fodder for new corporate supply chains. Last week, it was reported that legacy startups are being sought out for their corporate communications (from Slack archives, Jira tickets, and other internal messaging platforms), which can be turned into AI fuel.