James McAvoy and Tom Brady fall for ‘Goodbye Meta AI’ hoax

More than 600,000 people, including many celebrities, have fallen for a hoax claiming to deny Facebook and Instagram owner Meta the right to use their images for training artificial intelligence (AI).

Film stars James McAvoy and Ashley Tisdale, as well as former NFL player Tom Brady, are among those who re-shared the fake “Goodbye Meta AI” message on Instagram stories.

The hoax claims that by sharing the message, Meta would no longer be able to use their information.

In reality, Facebook and Instagram users who want to opt out of AI training can do so in their account settings – and posting about it does nothing.

Many of these messages have now been labelled “false information” by Lead Stories, one of Meta’s third-party fact-checking sites.

The post appears to have been created in opposition to Meta’s announcement in June that it will use public posts to train its AI model – but the company has confirmed to the BBC that posting the message has no impact on any user’s privacy settings.

“Sharing this story does not count as a valid form of objection,” a Meta spokesperson said.