Nick Heer blogging about the report of Meta’s plans for AI-generated social content:
Imagine opening any of Meta’s products after this has taken over. Imagine how little you will see from the friends and family members you actually care about. Imagine how much slop you will be greeted with — a feed alternating between slop, suggested posts, and ads, with just enough of what you actually opened the app to see.
This is absolutely going to happen, and it’s going to happen so incrementally — one AI-generated photo here, another there — that many current Threads and Instagram users won’t even notice until it’s too late, until after they’ve wasted their lives, forever reloading a timeline of content from robots.
I’m not an AI skeptic. I believe in AI as a tool to help humans, allowing us to achieve things we couldn’t quite reach before. But I don’t believe in it to replace our jobs wholesale, whether real jobs or the virtual factory floor of unpaid content creators. Most AI company CEOs skirt around the downsides of AI, and they certainly don’t talk out loud about replacing jobs. That it seems Meta’s leadership openly wants to replace humanity’s creativity is a little bit sick.
The cure is a simple, reverse-chronological social timeline. A timeline that is finite.
In the age of AI, content will be abundant. Ad-based platforms feed off abundance, printing money faster as they fill ad inventory. There can never be too much content for algorithmic timelines — more data to rank by engagement, more data to funnel through the outrage machine to see what sticks — so algorithmic timelines will always trend toward slop.
