Meta will track employees’ mouse clicks to train AI models

Meta has revealed that it will track the way its staff work in order to provide more accurate training for its AI models.

Meta is to track the way its employees work in order to train its AI models.

The tech behemoth – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – informed workers on Tuesday (21.04.26) that their keystrokes and mouse clicks will be monitored by a new tool that will log their activity so it can be used as training data for AI technology.

A Meta spokesman told the BBC: “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them.

“The data is not used for any other purpose.”

Meta’s Model Capability Initiative (MCI) will operate on work-related apps and will take occasional screenshots of content on employees’ screens, according to a memo posted by a staff AI research scientist in a channel for the firm’s model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team.

The purpose is to improve the company’s AI models in areas where the tech struggles to replicate how humans interact with computers, such as choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts.

The memo said: “This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work.”

Meta has been aggressively moving to incorporate AI into its work and the company’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told staff that the firm would ramp up internal data collection as part of its “AI for Work” efforts.

He wrote in a separate memo: “The vision we are building towards is ​one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.”

However, the move has led to some unease amongst Meta employees – with one anonymous staff member describing it as “very dystopian”.

They added to the BBC: “This company has become obsessed with AI.”