Oh, good.
Slop Rock
Instead of stemming the tide of a massive tidal wave of AI slop menacing his platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he welcomes AI-generated content on Facebook and Instagram.
During the company’s third-quarter earnings call this week, Zuckerberg promised to “add a whole new category of content which is AI-generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” as quoted by Fortune.
Reading between the lines, instead of making the company’s social media platforms a more livable and less ad-infested space, the billionaire is instead choosing to fan the flames — at the same time that Meta pours resources into its own AI.
“And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time,” an optimistic Zuckerberg told investors.
Shrimp My Ride
We’ve already seen the proliferation of meaning-defying AI slop — such as AI-generated images of “shrimp Jesus,” an 18-wheeler overflowing with babies, or a police officers hefting massive bibles through floodwaters — infesting content feeds on Facebook and Instagram.
It’s become increasingly difficult to get away from these posts, which are being surfaced frequently by Meta’s content algorithms. That’s likely due to a number of factors, including many gullible Facebook and Instagram users falling wholesale for these AI-generated images, which are often designed to tug at heartstrings or invoke other kinds of strong emotional reactions.
Human users are posting less and less on the platforms — meaning another reading of Zuckerberg’s remarks are that he intends to repopulate those feeds with synthetic content instead.
During this week’s call, Zuckerberg admitted that a “very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends.”
Instead, his solution is to have feeds populated with “recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you.”
Translation: expect to see even fewer of your friends’ life updates on Facebook and Instagram, which have already become notoriously hard to find.
None of this should be all too surprising. By using AI to tinker with its feed and video recommendations, Meta claims that it has boosted time spent on Facebook by eight percent and Instagram by five percent so far this year. Even advertisers are using Meta’s new tools to come up with AI-generated ads.
But at what cost? Scrolling Facebook and Instagram, they often feel like they’re continuing a years-long slide to the graveyard of irrelevancy.
More on Facebook: Investigation Finds Actual Source of All That AI Slop on Facebook