Your Instagram and Facebook pictures are being used by Meta to teach its AI models.

While other tech companies are vying for AI training data, Meta seems to have a big edge over them: it uses photos from Instagram and Facebook.

Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, told Bloomberg’s Tech Summit on Thursday that the company trains its Emu text-to-image creator model with pictures and text that are available to the public on platforms.

“We never train on secret stuff, we don’t train on things that people swap with their friends, we teach on things that are public,” he stated.

The text-to-image example in Meta can make “really amazing quality images” because Instagram has a lot of pictures of “art, fashion, culture, and also just photos of people and us,” Cox said.

Meta AI’s website says that users can make pictures by typing a prompt that starts with “imagine.” It will then make four pictures.

For AI models to work, they need to be fed and taught on data. There’s not much that can be done to stop protected material from being taken from the internet and used to make an LLM, so it’s been a controversial topic.

This problem has been tried to be solved by the US Copyright Office since the beginning of the year, and the office is thinking about changing its rules to suit.

Companies try to get info in several ways, including by working together with other companies. For example, OpenAI has teamed up with several media companies to sell their material and help build its models.

The New York Times reported last month that Meta thought about buying Simon & Schuster to get more data to use to train its models.

To train their models, businesses use both raw data sets and “feedback loops.” A feedback loop collects data from past contacts and outputs that are then studied to make future performance better. It has tools that let AI models know when they make a mistake so they can learn from it.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, told The Verge last month that feedback circles will be “more valuable” than any “upfront canon.”

Business Insider asked Meta for a response outside of normal business hours, but they didn’t answer right away.