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

In Brief

Meta has found a new source of training data for its AI models: its own employees. The company plans to use data culled from the mouse movements and keystrokes of its own staff in its pursuit to build more capable and efficient artificial intelligence.

The story, which was first reported by Reuters, shows the lengths to which tech companies are going to find new sources of training data — the lifeblood of AI models that helps the programs learn how to more effectively carry out tasks and respond to user queries.

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

This trend would seem to reveal the troublesome privacy implications of the AI industry, as yesterday’s internal corporate communications are increasingly becoming fodder for a new corporate supply chain. Last week it was reported that old startups were being scavenged for their corporate communications (from Slack archives, Jira tickets and other internal messaging platforms), which could be converted into AI fuel.