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.
b.loftin2 We’ve been having a conversation on a long-time FB skateboarding group about moving the group elsewhere, for this among other reasons. Shared your post. Thanks. Very timely.
scattershot I’ve been left wondering today, since I saw the Meta news earlier this afternoon, do you think that this would improve or degrade the quality of information on the platform on average?
Similarly, I wonder if models used by “social media” websites could be fine tuned enough to allow for a more heavy handed sort of steering of the trending, for you, what’s hot sorta of algorithms?
Mathew Packer I wonder how many bots are commenting snotty replies on posts in groups and public accounts on Facebook just to stir up responses, fueling whatever discourse the advertiser wants.
Rene van Belzen You can’t really blame Meta for a lackadaisical US lawmaker, more concerned about daily news coverage than consistency and fairness of their laws. As long as they don’t step in, Meta can do what ByteDance is prohibited to do.
Philip Brewer @renevanbelzen Well, I blame them for not showing me the content I want: stuff my friends posted. (I have zero interest in any other stuff.)
Tip: If you avoid Facebook for a couple of weeks, and then go back, you will (briefly) see almost entirely content generated by the people you follow.
Rene van Belzen @philipbrewer You can ask Meta to refund what you paid for using Facebook 😉 As for not using Facebook, why stop at a few weeks, why not for a whole year, or longer? They will not give you what you want, because you’re not their customer, their (paying) advertisers are.
Philip Brewer @renevanbelzen Meh. I joined Facebook years and years ago, before it had been enshitified. Before people even knew what enshitification was. I don’t want what I paid for; I want what I was promised.
Steven D. BREWER @philipbrewer It’s also astonishing what happens when you change your profile picture: they show that to ALL your friends.
