NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

On Facebook or Instagram? You’ve Been Training AI

Did you know you were training AI? You thought you were just sharing memories with friends and family, but all this time, your public posts were contributing to Meta's AI development. Surprised? You're not alone.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has confirmed that it has been using public posts, photos, and comments from both platforms since 2007 to train its AI models.

This admission was made during an inquiry by Australian lawmakers, where Meta's global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, acknowledged the extensive data scraping.

Key concerns:

• No Opt-Out for Non-EU Users: Unlike users in the European Union, users in the US, Australia, and other regions do not have the option to opt out of having their public posts used for AI training.

• Privacy Concerns: The practice has raised significant privacy concerns, with lawmakers and users questioning the legality and ethics of using such data without explicit consent.

• Age Limitations: Meta has stated that it does not use data from users under the age of 18 for AI training, but it does use photos and videos of children posted by adults.

Users can prevent future scraping by setting their posts to private, but this does not address the data already collected.

ps. Heads up, LinkedIn users should be aware that the platform has automatically included their data in the training of its generative AI models, without explicitly seeking their consent.

Bottom line: I don’t know about you, but I really dislike my data being used to train AI without my permission. This revelation highlights even more for me the need for stricter privacy regulations globally.

When AI Makes You Profitable with Questionable Ethics

Shein, the fast fashion giant, has nearly doubled its carbon emissions in 2023, making it the biggest polluter in the industry. Here’s the kicker: the company's use of AI and machine learning to predict demand and manage its supply chain is contributing to both its rapid growth and environmental impact.

A really interesting article by Grist highlighted this point, and confirms my hypothesis: companies get too excited about AI and its profitability and are too often willing to sacrifice its impact on society and sustainability.

Key points:

AI Personalizes Clothing to Consumer Trends Almost Real-Time

• AI predicts trends and customer preferences in real-time, leading to the constant production of new styles.

• All 5,400 of Shein's suppliers have access to an AI software platform that gives them live updates on customer preferences and adds up to 10,000 new items daily to meet trends.

Production and Shipping of Such “Fast Fashion” Increase Carbon Emissions

• Fast fashion means a new Shein design may take as little as 10 days to become a garment, and carbon emissions from manufacturing skyrocket.

• Heavy reliance on air freight for fast delivery means a much larger carbon footprint than sea or land transport.

The worst part: The more AI helps create a constant stream of new, cheap items, the more customers are enticed to buy more frequently and the awful cycle continues.

Bottom line: While AI makes Shein's operations more efficient in terms of meeting consumer demand, it simultaneously accelerates the environmentally harmful aspects of fast fashion, leading to increased emissions, waste, and resource consumption. 😔 

WOMAN IN TECH

Meet Neha Narkhede, Co-Founder, Confluent

Celebrating this week's Woman in Tech 🥳: Meet Neha Narkhede, co-founder of Confluent, the $7.5 billion company that went public in 2021.

Born in India, her journey started with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Savitribai Phule Pune University and an MS in the same subject from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Her career trajectory:

• She began her career at Oracle in 2008, where she served as a lead engineer, designing and implementing hierarchical faceted search in Oracle Text.

• In 2011, she joined LinkedIn as a software engineer, where she co-created Apache Kafka - the open-source messaging system that handles data pipelines for 1000s of companies, including Fortune 100, such as Goldman Sachs, Target, and Intuit.

• In 2014, Narkhede co-founded Confluent, through which she helped organisations deploy their systems on Apache Kafka and process large amounts of data with it.

By 2019, Confluent had raised more than $200 million from VC firms, and it went public in 2021, hitting a market cap of $24.75 billion and making Narkhede a billionaire for several months. She continues to serve on the company’s board today.

Narkhede has been featured as one of:

• Forbes’ America’s Self Made Women (2024)

• Forbes’ World’s Top 50 Women in Tech (2018)

• Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People (2016)

In 2021, she co-founded Oscilar, an AI fraud-detection firm working to make online transactions safer. The no-code AI platform is designed to allow for quick adoption and deployment without engineering resources.

Ps. Narkhede runs Oscilar together with her husband, Sachin Kulkarni, and the $20 million company is entirely self-funded by them.

Food for Thought

Would You License Your Voice to AI?

James Earl Jones, the renowned actor who voiced Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, passed away this month at the age of 93. Before his death, Jones had signed over the rights to his archival voice work to Lucasfilm and Ukrainian AI startup Respeecher, allowing the use of AI to recreate his iconic voice for future Star Wars projects.

Happy weekend everyone 😊😊

Until next time!

Ayesha ♥️

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