“Goodbye Meta AI” is the latest Facebook copypasta to go viral online. It’s a thick wall of text pasted over a fuzzy orange and yellow gradient background, bearing all the hallmarks of the trend: vague references to the legal system and unilateral declarations of self-protection. It almost feels nostalgic, an explosion of mandated culture. email chain from the pastBut unfortunately, posting an image on Facebook, Instagram, or any social media platform is not the way to prevent your posts from being sent to AI models.
This is certainly not the first time that a meaningless copypasta has been spread on the social network. More than a decade ago, WIRED covered a popular “copyright hoax” involving “pseudo-legal jargon” that flooded Facebook. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.
“Goodbye Meta AI,” which has been shared thousands of times—including, reportedlyon 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 retrieve personal information from tech companies is understandable. Companies know so many granular details about users’ lives and desires that it can be unsettling. And, in the current wave of generative AI, anything posted online seems vulnerable to being scraped to train the next bigger, badder AI model.
Two of the biggest red flags that can help you spot a copypasta like this right away 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 claims to be part of advice from an anonymous lawyer. 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 do not currently have an opt-out feature, we have built tools within the platform that allow people to remove their personal information from chats with Meta AI across all of our apps,” says Emil Vazquez, a spokesperson for the company, when contacted by email. You can find the steps for that here hereIt also notes that European users can opt out of having personal information used for AI models, though as WIRED reported last year, the opt-out form will do little, if any, for them.
So if a bad copy-paste doesn’t work, what can you do to prevent your public words and images from being used for Meta’s AI model or that of another AI company? Stop posting online, that’s all. Short of walking away and not posting again, there’s no realistic way to avoid the nimble data-harvesting bots as an individual user right now.
With this in mind, you can take steps to reduce the amount of information publicly available on your social media profiles, for example: A little more privacyPlus, downloading old posts for your own records and then removing large amounts of them from the internet isn’t a bad idea. Want to go further? Check out this list of websites and apps that let you opt out of at least one aspect of their AI training practices.
