Facebook & Twitter sent cease and desist letters to creepy AI startup

It was only last week I reported on some law enforcement adopting a new artificial intelligence to assist them in investigations. Now, the company behind that artificial intelligence has been asked to cease and desist by multiple social media platforms.

The artificial intelligence we are talking about here is from Clearview and is a facial recognition software that uses public personal images scraped from multiple social media platforms to identify people. This AI has been fed over 3 billion publically available images and can now identify almost anyone at the drop of a hat. Clearview, the company behind the AI, has been pushing into government and law enforcement as they believe what they have created can assist in investigations.

According to a Facebook spokesperson who spoke to Buzzfeed News, Facebook has sent "multiple letters" asking Clearview to cease and desist scaping "data, images and media" from Facebook and Instagram. Facebook isn't alone in asking Clearview to 'please stop', as back in late January, Twitter also sent letters to Clearview. YouTube and Venmo are also in the same letter sending boat as the other social media platforms.

The main question now is - what happens to all of the images that the AI has already been fed if it does stop scraping? Do they get deleted? Because it has already been fed over three billion images, which would be enough to be able to identify and track at least a large part of the population.