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

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: “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.”

This trend reveals a troublesome privacy dimension of the AI industry. Last week it was reported that old startups are being scavenged for their corporate communications (like Slack archives and Jira tickets), and converted into AI training data.