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

Those who shared the fake “Goodbye Meta AI” message on Instagram Stories included movie stars James McAvoy and Ashley Tisdale, as well as former NFL player Tom Brady.

The hoax claims that if the post is shared, Meta will 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 will have no effect.

Many of these posts are now being labeled as “false information” by Lead Stories, one of Meta’s third-party fact-checking sites.

It appears the post was made in opposition to Meta’s announcement in June that it will use public posts to train its AI model. However, the company confirmed to the BBC that posting the message will not affect users’ privacy settings.

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

Main Stories the origin of the trend established to a Facebook post on September 1, which 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 craze really took off, with Google Trends showing a sharp increase in searches for the phrase “Goodbye Meta AI” after September 24.

It’s not the first time that social media has been dominated by this kind of “copypasta” – a term used to describe a block of text that is regularly “copied and pasted” online.

The fact-checking website Snopes has multiple cases treated from the past decade in which users expressed their privacy rights in public messages, but without results.

But it’s rare for so many well-known accounts to fall for the hoax.

Plans by other social media companies to train AI models on public posts have also faced criticism, as did LinkedIn this week. reverse his decision to do that in the UK.