Mark Zuckerberg Embraces AI-Generated Content for Meta Platforms

Mark Zuckerberg wants to feed you more AI slop | Parmy Olson

Have you started to notice more AI-generated nonsense on social media? All over Facebook feeds there are bizarre images of Jesus made from shrimp, suspiciously perfect log-cabin interiors and photorealistic children holding professional-looking paintings. And Mark Zuckerberg doesn't just expect this flood of machine-made content to continue -- he's working to accelerate it. Unlike the captains of other tech giants who are building AI models and then selling access to them, the chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc. has made his free. Meta's Llama 3.2 can generate text and images and is marketed as open source, meaning anyone can modify its code. Software developers have used Llama to make apps that turn personal photos into works of art or to create "personally-tailored" marketing content. According to Zuckerberg, these efforts aim to stop a consolidation of control in AI. "What you want to prevent is one organization from getting way more advanced and powerful than everyone else," he said in February. But he offered additional reasoning this week: Free AI tools mean more AI slop, a potential boon for his platform. When an analyst on the call asked about the proliferation of AI apps, the Meta CEO talked about how developers could use Llama to create more AI content that "just makes people's feed experiences better." Here's his full comment, with my own emphasis: "If you look at the big trends in Feeds over the history of the company, it started off as friends, right? So all the updates that were in there were basically from your friends posting things. And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends ... "And I think we're going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way. And I think that that's going to be just very exciting for the -- for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads or other kind of Feed experiences over time." Get ready, folks. In much the same way that short videos and viral content took over feeds once populated with posts from our friends and family, the next wave of content will be machine-generated. A progression from personal to viral content and now to AI content seems like a dystopian direction for a social media firm that's long framed itself as "connecting people." But Zuckerberg calls this new trend "promising." His view is not unusual in the industry. I've spoken to several technology executives who believe that AI-generated content -- which could make up as much as 90% of content on the -internet, according to one wild estimate -- will be accepted as the new normal. AI-generated videos will eventually be called "videos," the thinking goes. Facebook has already been flooded with bizarre imagery dubbed AI slop. Earlier this year, researchers who investigated more than 100 Facebook pages posting high volumes of AI content found that some were posting dozens of these images each day. Some were content creators trying to grow their followers, while others were scammers trying to advertise nonexistent products or drive traffic to ad-filled websites. The slop can have a real-world impact. On Thursday, thousands of people in Dublin, Ireland, were reportedly duped into visiting a nonexistent Halloween parade after seeing AI-generated ads that spread across social media, according to disinformation researcher Ciaran O'Connor. Content farms once flooded Facebook with low-quality, human-written articles to game the algorithm, but AI tools let you generate far more content at no cost. In effect, it's a new form of clickbait, and researchers have shown that Facebook's algorithm happily promotes it. Which brings us to the real reason Zuckerberg made his AI free. By getting AI models into the hands of as many developers as possible, Meta is getting more AI-generated content onto the web. The higher the volume of AI content, the more likely there will be posts that can go viral on Meta's platforms to keep people scrolling. That's critical for a company that generates 98% of its revenue from advertising. Let's hope the public pushes back on the slop. Viral AI content might seem like harmless entertainment, but flooding people's feeds with machine-generated noise crowds out the experience of genuine human expression and authenticity. Zuckerberg risks repeating an ignoble chapter in Facebook's history when its algorithms rewarded clickbait farms and mass-produced content. He can hardly call it "social" anymore. Soon it won't be "media" either.

Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Feed You More AI Slop

Have you started to notice more AI-generated nonsense on social media? All over Facebook feeds there are bizarre images of Jesus made from shrimp, suspiciously perfect log-cabin interiors and photorealistic children holding professional-looking paintings. And Mark Zuckerberg doesn't just expect this flood of machine-made content to continue -- he's working to accelerate it. Unlike the captains of other tech giants who are building AI models and then selling access to them, the chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc. has made his free. Meta's Llama 3.2 can generate text and images and is marketed as open source, meaning anyone can modify its code. Software developers have used Llama to make apps that turn personal photos into works of art or to create "personally-tailored" marketing content.

Mark Zuckerberg Pledges to Fill Facebook With Even More AI Slop

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. 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.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves

"I think we're going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated." During my year-long odyssey into the world of AI-generated slop on Facebook and other Meta platforms, I had come to the conclusion that Meta does not mind -- and actively likes -- the bizarre AI spam that has taken over its platforms. Wednesday, in a call with investors, Mark Zuckerberg made this clear: The AI-generated content will continue until morale improves. In a quarterly earnings call that was overwhelmingly about AI and Meta's plans for it, Zuckerberg said that new, AI-generated feeds are likely to come to Facebook and other Meta platforms. Zuckerberg said he is excited for the "opportunity for AI to help people create content that just makes people's feed experiences better." Zuckerberg's comments were first reported by Fortune. "I think we're going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way," he said. "And I think that that's going to be just very exciting for the -- for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads or other kind of Feed experiences over time." Zuckerberg said this would continue to be an evolution of traditional feeds on Meta products. As we have previously reported, the virality of AI-generated slop made and posted by people trying to make money on Facebook has been powered by Meta's "recommendation" algorithm, which boosts content that was not posted by your friends or anyone you know -- and which is often engagement bait -- into feeds because it increases engagement and time on site. Wednesday, Zuckerberg explained this strategy in the investor call, and said the new AI feeds would be built with the success of the recommended feed in mind. "If you look at the big trends in Feeds over the history of the company, it started off as friends, right?," he said. "So all the updates that were in there were basically from your friends posting things. And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends. It may not even be from people that you're following directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you." What he is describing, of course, are social media networks that are not even remotely social and which may increasingly not even feature much human-made content at all. Both Facebook and Instagram are already going this way, with the rise of AI spam, AI influencers, and armies of people copy-pasting and clipping content from other social media networks to build their accounts. This content and this system, Meta said, has led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6 percent increase in time spent on Instagram, all at the expense of a shared reality and human connections to other humans. In the earnings call, Zuckerberg and Susan Li, Meta's CFO, said that Meta has already slop-ified its ad system and said that more than 1 million businesses are now creating more than 15 million ads per month on Meta platforms using generative AI. "The Gen AI tools that we have built here that will help us enable businesses to make ads significantly more customized at scale, which is going to accrue to ad performance," Li said. "That's a place where, again, we're already seeing promising results in both performance gains and adoption. I think we shared that over a million advertisers use our Gen AI ad tools specifically." Like most every other company that has gone all-in on AI, Li said Meta trains its AI models "on content that is publicly available online, and we crawl the web for a variety of purposes."

Mark Zuckerberg says a lot more AI generated content is coming to fill up your Facebook and Instagram feeds

First we had friends. Then we had influencers. And if Mark Zuckerberg is correct, the next big thing in our social media feeds will be AI generated content. Lots of it. Zuckerberg described our future feeds during Facebook-parent company Meta's third quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, describing it as a natural evolution. "I think were going 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," the Meta CEO said. "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." Zuckerberg touted the company's Llama large language model and the success of products it powers, such as the Meta AI chatbot that is now used by more than 500 million users every month. But Llama will increasingly play a role across Meta's business, Zuckerberg said, including tools for business customers and advertisers. As AI tools become more widespread, AI content will proliferate within social media feeds. Such feeds are actively being worked on inside Meta, Zuckerberg noted. "It's something we're starting to test different things around." "I don't know if we know what's exactly going to work really well yet, but some things are really promising," he added. "I have high confidence that over the next several years, this will be one of the important trends and one of the important applications." Zuckerberg described the category as the likely next wave of content for platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg noted how platforms like Facebook and Instagram started off recommending and curating content from a user's friends and family, what Meta called its "connected" algorithm. The platforms then moved to an engagement-based algorithm, recommending content from all over the platforms, mostly from creators and influencers, which Meta targets to individual users based on various "signals." Signs of the next, AI phase are already out there. Facebook is already one Meta platform where AI generated content, sometimes referred to as "AI slop," is increasingly common. Strange images are often created with the goal of going viral and generating payments from Facebook's creator program, which can be as high as $10 per 1,000 likes on a post, according to a report from 404 Media. While such content has so far been less prevalent on Instagram, it appears to be on the way. A report by the newsletter User Mag found that an account claiming to be that of a restaurant touting itself as the "#1 restaurant in Austin" does not exist. The account is entirely AI generated content of various photos of fake food and people, even one post of a generated image of Jeff Bezos claiming the Amazon billionaire was "behind the bar" of the restaurant because "One of our chefs happens to be buds with Jeff." Despite the subject of the account being entirely fictional, and all of its content AI generated and not disclosed as such, it remains up. In fact, since it was revealed to be a fantasy, the account has gained about 10,000 new followers.