Be careful what you say to Meta AI, and be prepared for more targeted ads

Meta will use your interactions with its artificial intelligence (AI) features to feed you ads based on your activity starting mid-December.

Many Instagram and Facebook users know that Meta has long been using their interactions on the apps to tailor specialized ads aimed at selling you stuff you don’t really need.

Now, Meta plans to use your interactions with its AI features to further tailor ads and sell you even more stuff you don’t need.

Last year, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads launched Meta AI, an assistant that was integrated into many of its products. Meta built the assistant around its native large language model (LLM), Llama 4, which Mark Zuckerberg’s company has been developing for years.

“Whether it’s a voice chat or a text exchange with our AI features, this update will help us improve the recommendations we provide for people across our platforms so they’re more likely to see content they’re actually interested in – and less of the content they’re not,” Meta said.

If a user “chats” with Meta AI about hiking, that user may see more recommendations for hiking groups, posts from friends regarding good trails to try out, or ads for hiking boots.

However, Meta assures that certain topics of conversation are off limits and won’t be used to tailor ads.

For example, suppose a user has a conversation with Meta’s AI about politics, sexual orientation, religion, health, racial or ethnic origin, and other sensitive topics. In that case, they won’t be used to tailor ads.

Meta also assures users that they are in control. Users have access to tools such as Ad Preferences and other feed controls, so they can “adjust the content and ads” at any time.

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“We’ll start to use your AI interactions to personalize content and ad recommendations after these changes go into effect on December 16th, 2025,” Meta said in a statement.

Users will be notified on October 7th, 2025, of the update via notifications within apps like Instagram. Emails will also be sent to users several weeks before the December deadline.

Over 1 billion people are said to use Meta AI monthly, meaning that these interactions will be used to continue delivering tailored ads and specialized content to its users.

Targeted ads tend to use cookies, which are little digital markers that show what you’ve been doing online.

These ads collect a lot of information about the user, from non-personal information, like what web pages they visit, to sensitive data, like their IP addresses.

With this information comes a risk to our digital privacy, as users can feel like they’re being tracked and their sensitive information is being used against them.

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