James McAvoy and Tom Brady fall for the “Goodbye Meta AI” hoax

More than 600,000 people, including many celebrities, have fallen for a hoax claiming to deny Facebook and Instagram owner Meta the right to use their images to train artificial intelligence (AI).

Movie stars James McAvoy and Ashley Tisdale and former NFL player Tom Brady are among those who reshared the fake “Goodbye Meta AI” message on Instagram Stories.

The hoax states that by sharing the message, Meta would no longer be able to use their information.

In reality, Facebook and Instagram users who want to opt out of AI training can do so in their account settings – and posting about it does nothing.

Many of these messages have now been classified as “false information” by Lead Stories, one of Meta’s third-party fact-checking websites.

The post appears to have been created contrary to metas Announced in June that it will use public posts to train its AI model – but the company has confirmed to the BBC that posting the message will not affect a user's privacy settings.

“Sharing this story is not considered a valid form of objection,” a Meta spokesperson said.

Lead stories got to the heart of the trend to a post on Facebook from September 1st that used slightly different wording than the version that eventually went viral.

But it wasn't until this week when major celebrity accounts began sharing the post that the buzz took hold, with Google Trends seeing a steep increase in searches for the term “Goodbye Meta AI” after September 24th.

It's far from the first time that social media has been dominated by such “copypasta” – a term that describes a block of text that is frequently “copied and pasted” online.

The fact-checking website Snopes has covered several cases from the last decade in which users explained their privacy rights in public messages to no avail.

But it's rare to see so many high-profile accounts fall for the scam.

Plans for other social media companies to train AI models on public posts have also drawn criticism, according to LinkedIn this week to reverse his decision to do this in the UK.