Facebook’s latest AI feature can scan your phone’s camera roll

A Facebook feature that scans your phone’s photo library to make AI collages and edits is now available in North America. Meta tested it earlier this year. It’s an opt-in feature, but the company may train its models on your media if you use its AI editing or share the results.

From a user experience perspective, the idea is to help you find “hidden gems” in your library and turn them into something shareable. After scanning your photo library (with your permission), it will cough up suggestions. For example, it might recommend a collage based on a vacation, a recap of a graduation party or simply spruce up some photos with AI. For better or worse, it’s another step in the direction of automating creativity and skill.

Zooming out to Meta’s business motives, it’s easy to imagine this is a move for more AI training data. The company says it won’t train its AI on your camera roll “unless you choose to edit this media with our AI tools, or share.” If you find it useful enough to use, your media may help train Meta’s AI models.

The company says the feature’s suggestions are private to you until you choose to share them. Its permissions state, “To create ideas for you, we’ll select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis, based on info like time, location or themes.” However, Meta says your media won’t be used for ad targeting.

Fortunately, it’s opt-in, so you can safely ignore this altogether without privacy worries. If you grant it permission, you’ll see its suggestions (visible only to you) in Stories and Feed. And should you activate it but change your mind later, you can turn it back off through Facebook’s camera roll settings.

The feature is available now in the US and Canada. Meta says it will soon begin testing it in other countries.