United States, Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe: these are the countries where the new artificial intelligence is already available, or will be available shortly of Meta, simply called Meta AI and integrated directly inside Whatsapp And Facebook.
As is easy to see, there is no European country in this list, because the EU blocked Meta AI. Or, rather, the EU blocked the process chosen by Meta to train its artificial intelligence algorithms. The problem? The usual: the user privacy.
Meta AI does not pass into the EU
To be precise, Meta AI was not blocked by the European Union, but by Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which is basically the Irish Privacy Guarantor. As is known, in order to pay much less tax, Meta has its European registered office in Ireland and, consequently, the DPC decides whether its services violate the privacy of EU citizens.
And the DPC thought about it twice: the first time, issuing a positive opinion while the second time it issued a negative opinion. In fact, they arrived between the first and second opinions several complaints by the non-profit associations that deal with right to privacy.
Meta AI has a big privacy problem
The crux of the issue between Meta and the EU, as usual, is user privacy. The problem, in this case, is that to train the artificial intelligence algorithms Meta would like to use i published data (with public privacy) on the European profiles of Facebook And Instagram.
Data collection would be anonymousbut definitely massive: just think of the enormous quantity of material produced, in 20 years of history (a little less in Europe), by hundreds of millions of users of the two social networks.
According to Meta, this data is essential to calibrate its AI on culturei tastes and the sensitivity of Europeans: without such data, in fact, Meta AI reasons “American style” and it is not at all certain that this will go well in Europe. Just think of the fierce criticism received by Gemini AI, Google’s artificial intelligence, because it designed female Popes with Native American features to avoid offending minorities.
The set of data on which an AI trains, in fact, is crucial for a good final result of the tools offered to users. But precisely the indiscriminate collection of data is at the center of the controversynot only in Europe but also in the rest of the world.
What Meta AI can do
Just like Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot And OpenAI ChatGPTAlso Meta AI it is essentially a chatbots, that is, software to which you can ask questions to get answers. It is therefore not at all surprising that its first implementation was within WhatsApp.
In the USA, and in the other countries already mentioned, WhatsApp users can use Meta AI for free by entering questions into the chat app’s search box, or by tagging @MetaAI within a conversation with any user or group. They can also request image generation, do web searches, ask for recipes.
Meta AI is also present in the American Facebook apps, for example with the “Ask Meta AI” that appears below photos and videos shown in the feed. If the user presses that key Meta AI analyzes the content and tries to extract the key elements and then explain them.
Finally, Meta AI is also available via the website meta.ai but, at the moment, it is not reachable from Europe.
