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“Goodbye Meta AI” is the most recent Facebook copypasta to go viral online. A chunky wall of text pasted against a hazy orange-yellow gradient background, it’s complete with all the trend’s hallmarks: vague references to the legal system and unilateral declarations of personal protection. It almost feels nostalgic, a blast from the compulsory chain-email past. But, unfortunately, posting an image on Facebook, Instagram, or any social media platform is not how you actually opt out of having your posts be fed to AI models.
This definitely isn’t the first time a meaningless copypasta has spread on the social media site. More than a decade ago, WIRED covered a popular “copyright hoax” with “pseudo-legalese” blanketing Facebook. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now.
“Goodbye Meta AI,” which has been shared thousands of times—including, reportedly, in the Instagram Stories of Tom Brady and James McAvoy—has been circulating since early September. Its claim that it can protect your data is blatantly dubious to savvy internet users, but the underlying desire to claw back one’s personal information from tech companies is a sympathetic one. The companies know so many granular details about users’ lives and desires that it can be unsettling. And, in the ongoing wave of generative AI, everything posted online seems vulnerable to being scraped to train the next biggest, baddest AI model.
Two major red flags that can help you immediately spot a copypasta like this are urgent calls to action and unclear references to legal situations. In this case, the image says “all members must post” to keep their data safe, and it claims to be part of an unnamed attorney’s advice. The 2012 version said, “Anyone reading this can copy this text and paste it on their Facebook Wall.” The decade-old copypasta also included a misspelled reference to a European legal contract.
“While we don’t currently have an opt-out feature, we’ve built in-platform tools that allow people to delete their personal information from chats with Meta AI across our apps,” says Emil Vazquez, a spokesperson for the company, when reached via email. You can find the steps for that here. He also points out European users can object to personal info being used for AI models—although, as WIRED reported last year, the form to object isn’t going to do much, if anything, for you.
So, if an errant copypasta doesn’t work, what can you do to avoid having your public words and images be used for Meta’s AI model or that of another AI company? Stop posting online—that’s about it. Apart from walking away and never posting again, there’s not a realistic way for you to avoid the nimble scraper bots as an individual user right now.
With that in mind, you can take steps to reduce the amount of information publicly available on your social media profiles, for a bit more privacy. Also, downloading old posts for your own records then deleting large swathes of them from the internet isn’t a bad idea. Want to go further? Take a look at this list of websites and apps which allow you to opt out of least an aspect of their AI training practices.
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