Meta execs face call for EU-style AI opt out for Australians
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The news: Meta executives appearing before a Senate committee on artificial intelligence have faced a call for the company to offer Australian users the option to block the company from using their content to train its large language models.
The context: Meta’s global privacy policy director Melinda Claybaugh joined the company’s vice president of APAC public policy Simon Milner at the committee on Wednesday.
The pair faced questions about why Meta did not give Australian users the option to opt out of training the company’s AI models, and whether they thought it was unethical to train AI models on historical content that predated the technology.
Labor Senator Tony Sheldon, chair of the committee, said he would like to see Australians offered the same option as European users and asked why they currently did not have it.
Claybaugh told the committee that the option made available to European users was offered in response to a “specific legal framework”.
The legal framework in question is a set of its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws that apply to the continent. Australia’s privacy laws are currently not as stringent.
Meta and other tech companies building their own large language models have been the subject of mounting scrutiny from global lawmakers working to formulate regulatory guardrails for the technology.
The companies broadly argue the methods they use to gather and ingest information used to train their models is done legally.
What they said: “Firstly, the reason that Meta puts those higher privacy controls in Europe is because European lawmakers have set higher privacy standards with the GDPR, and you’re complying or seeking to comply with those privacy laws that are set across Europe in the GDPR. That's the difference with Australia, isn’t it?” Greens Senator David Shoebridge asked Claybaugh.
“That's correct,” Claybaugh responded.
The source: Senate Committee Hearing
