Meta Adds More Artificial Intelligence to Your Feeds
I’m extremely concerned about the prevalence of AI-powered content in our social media feeds . Now that virtually anyone can create hyper-realistic videos with a simple text query, I fear misinformation will grow exponentially, distorting our worldviews faster than algorithms have ever done. So you can imagine how I feel about Meta’s plans to add a “massive array” of AI-powered content to their feeds. Good luck, everyone.
This is straight from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg . On Wednesday, at Meta Platforms, Inc.’s financial results press conference , Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s plans to add to what he calls this vast corpus of content thanks to how easily AI creates and “remixes” content. Humans will create AI content, the platform’s recommendation systems will deliver that content to humans, who can then slightly tweak it and send it back to the Metaverse. As this feedback loop continues, feeds will begin to fill with more and more AI content. This is good news for Meta and anyone who enjoys watching surreal videos. For those of us who are a little tired of this content or worried about not being able to notice it during long scrolls, this is only bad news.
While much (if not most) of this AI content likely comes from external sources like OpenAI’s Sora , some of it may originate from Meta itself. The company recently launched ” Vibes ,” its own short AI video generator, part of the existing Meta AI app . Users can create videos directly in Vibes or remix existing ones. I’m betting Vibes content will appear in your Meta feed soon, if it hasn’t already.
Zuckerberg took the time to highlight how Meta’s AI-powered recommendation systems across all of the company’s core products—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—provide users with “higher-quality, more relevant content,” especially when it comes to video. It appears the time we spend watching videos on Instagram has increased by more than 30% year-over-year. (Fun fact: Reels generates over $50 billion in revenue, according to the conference call.) This environment seems ideally suited to foster a new wave of AI-powered content for Meta’s massive audience.
Look, I definitely laughed at some of the AI memes I came across. But claiming that flooding your feed with realistic AI videos without any regulation or forethought is a good idea is laughable in itself. If you use Meta products, be careful: you may not believe what you’re watching is real for a long time, if at all.