Unlike Google, which literally crawls the entire web, Meta has a lot less than that.

Despite lacking, Meta has billions of users, and that the social media giant knows how these people connect, where they are, who they know, and how they live their life. Meta as the owner of both Facebook and Instagram, knows a lot more about its users than Google ever does with its own users.

Whereas Google claims that has the right to use all publicly available information it can find on the web to Train its AI, Meta admits that it's using all of users' publicly available posts on its platforms to train its Meta AI.

What this means, both text and photos that users have uploaded to the Meta platforms, are for the taking.

This was revealed by Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs in an interview with Reuters.

"We've tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information," Clegg said, adding that the "vast majority" of the data Meta gathered for training its AI was publicly available.

What this means, Meta has little to no intention in using private posts, like those shared only with friends and family.

Meta has some measures to exclude private details from public datasets used by the AI, Clegg said, without detailing any specific measures being used.

Meta also didn't peak into users' private messages to train its AI model, Clegg added.

He also said that Meta didn't use websites like LinkedIn to train its AI due to privacy concerns.

Meta virtual assistant, called the Meta AI, is meant to help users create their own digital stickers based on text prompts, edit photos with text instructions, and chat with AI personalities.

It was built using the Meta's AI language model, LLaMA 2, and a text-to-image model called Emu.

With the revelation, it's revealed that those models were trained using Instagram and Facebook posts.

Read: Meta Announces 'LLaMA 2', The 'Next Generation' And 'Open Approach' For Generative AI

Authors, artists, and developers have been suing AI companies, like Meta, over concerns that their work is being used without their consent to train a technology that could undermine their careers.

Facebook and Instagram users own the content that they post as long as it doesn't infringe on someone else's intellectual property rights, per Meta's Intellectual Property policies.

Clegg added that he expects some people to legally contest whether training AI with copyrighted content is fair use.

"We think it is, but I strongly suspect that's going to play out in litigation," Clegg said.

Meta has always claimed a variety of rights in the content its users post, so legally, Meta operates in a different situation than companies that are using copyrighted materials.

The company always tell users that "you own all of the content and information" you post.

The weakness in this statement is that, users who have made their post public, as many do by default, are making their posts available for all sorts of purposes they cannot control.