Who can opt-out outside the UK and the EU?

Only artists in Europe had been given the option to opt out. “We couldn’t find [the forms] because they weren’t available,” [María] Luque told Rest of World.

Artists in Spanish-speaking Latin America —where AI regulation and privacy laws are outdated or nonexistent —are worried about the future of their work as Meta ramps up the training of its large language models by mining publicly shared content across its platforms. 

While the company gave its users in the EU and the U.K. the opportunity to protect their content —and has since paused its AI rollout there —most Meta users in Latin America will have no say in how the platforms use their content.

Rest of World spoke with nine Latin American artists, several of whom had been unaware of Meta’s plans to use their content for AI-related purposes until June, when the company announced it had “sent more than two billion in-app notifications and emails to people in Europe to explain what we’re doing.”

“Instead of adopting broader protection measures for all, which would mean granting the same rights to Latin Americans as those in the European Union, these platforms discriminate based on location,” Agneris Sampieri, Latin America policy analyst at digital rights group Access Now, told Rest of World.