Meta will watch its staff to train its artificial intelligence systems for the workplace, according to a new report.
The tracking software will capture employees’ mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes and use them to train new AI systems, it said in an internal memo that was reported by Reuters. The system will also be able to see what is happening on employees’ screens.
The tools called the Model Capability Initiative or MCI and will run on work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees’ screens, according to one of the memos, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a channel for the company's model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team.
The purpose, according to the memo, was to improve the company's AI models in areas where they struggle to replicate how humans interact with computers, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts.
"This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," it said.
The Facebook and Instagram owner has been moving aggressively to integrate AI into its workflows and reshape its workforce around the technology, arguing it will make the company operate more efficiently.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees in a separate memo shared on Monday that the company would step up internal data collection as part of those "AI for Work" efforts, now re-branded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA).
“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," Bosworth said. The aim, he added, was for agents to "automatically see where we felt the need to intervene so they can be better next time.”
Bosworth did not explicitly spell out how those agents would be trained, but said Meta would be “rigorous” about “building up data and evals for all the types of interactions we have as we go about our work.”
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged that the MCI data would be among the inputs.
Stone said the data gathered via MCI would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training and that safeguards were in place to protect "sensitive content," without elaborating on which types of data would be excluded from collection.
"If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus," said Stone.
Additional reporting by Reuters