Your Face or Mine?

Have you been watching the NFT craze? Are you curious about some of the unique pieces of art? While some NFTs are pieces of art clearly made from the same outline, there are some others with a more ethereal feel to them that feel non-human. That's right - there's AI generated art now. Speaking of AI, well really speaking of things that involve data, Meta is in trouble and not because of rude Metaverse user activity. Oh no, you can't blame the kids or people who grew up in Call of Duty lobbies. Meta is in trouble for misusing the facial recognition data of its users. 

We'll get to the Meta thing momentarily. First, we would like to take a look at AI art. What is AI art? Exactly what it sounds like: art generated in whole or in part by AI. How do you make AI art? If you're tech savvy you can develop your own AI. If you're not, there are options! There is a collection of tools and a variety of support groups and resources if you're coming from the art side of things - all you have to do is search and the first few .org results will put you in the right direction. There are a variety of tools ranging from AI that works independently off of descriptions to AIs that build human-like faces based off of cartoons. Speaking of faces, we bet you're curious about what's going on with Meta, right?

Getting to that, the state of Texas sued Meta for violating state privacy laws and wants Meta to be responsible for billions of dollars in damages. The suit is centered around the "tag suggestions" feature of Facebook, which ended last year. The feature used facial recognition to encourage users to link photos to their friend's profiles, but that's not all it did. Allegedly, Facebook also shared users' facial recognition data without consent and shared it with third party companies instead of destroying the information in a timely manner, which, surprise surprise, is a violation of the law. 

Which law? Well, the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act for starters. What is the punishment? $25,000 per violation. So, for every time each user's information was used against their knowledge and consent, that's $25,000 Meta has to pay if found guilty. If you were wanting to jump on the bandwagon for the suit now and you never previously had Facebook, it's too late; the facial recognition feature was shut down in November of last year. Facebook also claimed that it would delete the data it held on the users via this tool as well. Following what happens with this lawsuit will be interesting indeed as it may set the tone for storing, protecting, and distributing user data moving forward.