Meta Is Experimenting With AI-Generated Comments for Some Reason
It’s no surprise that companies continue to experiment with new AI features. Artificial intelligence has been at the forefront of new technologies for almost three years now, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. But whether you love generative AI or think it’s useless, I think we can all agree that using AI to write comments on Instagram is pretty stupid.
And yet, Meta appears to be testing just that. As SocialMediaToday reports , some Instagram accounts are now seeing a new icon to the left of the text field after they choose to leave a comment on a post. When you click on this icon (the pencil with the star), you open a new Meta AI menu that presents a range of comment options, presumably based on whatever content you’re viewing. In one example, the bot offers three choices: “Cute living room setting,” “Love the cozy atmosphere,” or “Great place for a photo shoot.” Could there be anything lazier than this?
I admit: this news took me by surprise. I know that Meta is comfortable shoving its AI experiments down our throats— often with no way to turn them off . But even as it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid AI-generated content on Meta platforms, I didn’t think the company would shift the “effort” of commenting to bots.
I can’t imagine that many (or perhaps any ) Instagram users are so busy or tired that they would rather run through AI’s ideas of what to say than say something themselves. Human-generated comments on Instagram pages already don’t require much effort; not to mention that there are too many comments from bots on social networks. Do we really want more comment bots, only this time sent to us by real people?
We need to stop letting AI make decisions
This is just an experiment, and most likely a limited one. Anyway, I don’t have that option on my Instagram account, so I guess I’ll have to come up with my own comments for now. (Or at least open another app to ask another AI to create a comment for me.) But this experiment speaks to the current state of AI in technology: it offers solutions to problems that don’t exist. Writing comments isn’t hard, and yet someone at Meta thought AI-generated comments were useful—there was a market. They likely want more training data for their AI machine that tracks, given that companies are running out of internet for models to learn from. But that doesn’t mean we should agree to outsource all human tasks to AI.
This is what worries me most: the transfer of many of our cognitive tasks and decisions to machines. If you’re on Instagram, you’re already letting the algorithm choose the content you see. Please don’t hand over more decisions to machines, no matter how minimal the effort. If you see an experiment on your side, I advise you not to use it; both for your own sake and for the sake of depriving Meta of any additional training data generated by its user base for free.