Meta's AI-Generated Content Sparks Controversy in Social Media Feeds

Custom AI Posts in Our Instagram Feeds? No Thanks, Meta

Katelyn is a writer with CNET covering social media, AI and online services. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. You can often find her with a novel and an iced coffee during her time off. I had to read the news about six times before it fully sunk in: Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, is experimenting with integrating custom AI content into our Instagram and Facebook feeds. To put it another way, Meta is exploring the idea of putting more recommended content (from accounts we don't follow) into our feeds, and it would be entirely generated by Meta's AI. As the person who reviews AI image generators for CNET, including Meta AI, let me tell you: This is a terrible idea. These photos, made with its AI assistant Meta AI, will be "based on your interests" and could potentially "feature you, so you can be the star of your own story and share your favorites with friends." So an AI version of your face could randomly pop up in your Instagram feed. Meta, respectfully... what? Why? Meta dropped a lot of news about its virtual assistant Meta AI this week at its annual AR/VR event Meta Connect, including a new voice featuring a variety of celebrity voices, better video dubbing translations and new visual upgrades that let it "see" your photos and edit them. But this news, buried near the end of its press release and omitted entirely from the keynote address, is important, and we need to talk about it. Mainly, we need to beg Meta not to let this experiment result in a real update. As AI content generation services get better, it's getting harder to escape the deluge of AI content (aka slop). It's also getting harder to tell real photos apart from AI ones. I admit, I was pretty impressed with Meta AI's Imagine feature, which acts as an AI image generator embedded in the chatbot. But that doesn't mean I want it to clog up my feed with weird images of me as an astronaut or whatever. Earlier this year, Meta started labeling content that was AI-generated, which was a great idea. But it wasn't a perfect tool, and photographers started getting slapped with AI labels for images that were edited, not AI-generated. The new recommended posts would have a similar label that says "Imagined for you." But labels are too easy to overlook, which is why I'm still concerned that rolling out this update would further blur the line between what's real and what's AI. And that's really the last thing we need, when mis- and disinformation is easier to create convincingly than ever before, thanks to AI. On the privacy front, CNET reached out to Meta to confirm whether you can remove AI-generated posts from your feed and if we can expect to see AI posts start to pop up while it's in the testing phase, but we didn't receive a response by the time of publication. We do know that US users cannot opt out of having publicly shared posts used for training its AI models. Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge that adding AI content to social feeds is the next "logical jump" for the social platforms. But I really can't imagine an AI image that's going to be so funny, so relevant or otherwise worth my time that it's going to make up for all the potential problems it could produce. Meta has spent so much time convincing us that if we want to use Meta AI, we can find it everywhere -- even if we didn't want it there, like in Search. Why do we need it in our feeds, too? My Instagram feed is already a mess, mostly clogged up by random accounts I don't follow, recommending content I might enjoy. I have to click through at least three ads to get to one Story from someone I follow. And I've put up with it, mostly because it's still my main online social hub. But the overall user experience of scrolling Instagram and Facebook has gone downhill in the past 10 years. We've long since moved past its original purpose to connect with friends and family, much to some users' disappointment, including me. Adding AI-generated recommended content to the mix feels like it will be the final nail in the coffin of my Instagram feed.

Meta is going to push AI-made posts into your feeds

Why it matters: Generative AI has largely been used to create content at the behest of individual users, but now Facebook's parent company says it will proactively surface AI-generated posts based on users' interests. Driving the news: As part of its slew of announcements on Wednesday at its annual developers conference, Meta says it's "starting to test content imagined for you by Meta AI that will appear in your Facebook and Instagram Feeds." Zoom in: In sample images, Meta showed its AI serving up the kinds of things users can choose to make today, such as stylized images and fantastical scenes. Between the lines: The move is a logical next step for Meta, which has increasingly been using the Facebook feed to surface content its algorithm thinks you will like, often instead of posts shared by friends. Yes, but: So far, a lot of the public reaction to AI-generated content in the realm of media and entertainment has not been enthusiastic, particularly outside gaming. Our thought bubble: Expect strong reaction -- both positive and negative -- to the notion of social media platforms proactively serving up personalized AI content. The bottom line: A future where our feeds will be filled with stuff written by a computer rather than a person is not a foregone conclusion. But it's not far off, either.

Not everything needs AI - especially Facebook & Instagram feeds

Enough people already have trouble separating fact from fiction on social media. But Meta has decided it's going to make things even worse. How? AI. Specifically how? By dreaming up Meta AI slop that it will inject directly into your Instagram and Facebook feeds. Sometimes with your actual face attached. When reading this news, I wondered if I was in the grip of a fever dream. I had my first bout of covid in August. Perhaps I remained in its thrall, in that barely coherent state that occurs when a virus is kicking seven shades out of your immune system. But no. Meta's plans are real. Unlike all the garbage the company plans to splatter all over your feeds, like projectiles from a manure gun. Meta explains this is all part of its plan to use AI to "help you get things done, learn, create and connect with the things and people that matter to you". Which apparently means being able to "imagine yourself as a visually stunning video game character" or creating images of a place where "moonbeams dance across a forest of lace, where trees and flowers are woven with intricate beauty, and tiny glittering diamonds sparkle like stardust within every delicate fold". To clarify at this point, you are also not in the grip of a fever dream. The words above are quoted verbatim from Facebook's news article. It explains a system is being tested which will create Meta AI images "just for you", based on your interests or current trends. I can only assume, based on the article, that Meta thinks user interests centre on being away with the fairies, in every sense. On the plus side, Meta has at least confirmed you have to approve your face being stapled to its AI slop, and can remove AI images from your feed. Up until the day you can't, of course. Meta has form when it comes to making weird and flat-out bad decisions regarding social media. In fact, it's making more here, because 'enchanted realm' images aren't even all of the new AI stuff. The same post outlines how Meta AI will have its own voice that you can set to be an uncanny valley Dame Judi Dench. And that Meta will attempt to auto-translate and auto-dub Reels into your language, even syncing people's lips to match. Which I'm sure won't be terrifying to watch and horrifying to experience when inevitable translation disasters occur. This all feels a long way from what social networks used to be. Facebook was once about keeping up with friends. Instagram was where you went for great photos, even if too many were of people's lunch. Today, both networks feel far beyond any golden age, ruined by Meta's insistence that you see what it wants you to rather than what you want to. But at least authenticity remained in your feeds. Now even that is threatened. Still, it's not all bad news on the AI front. HP's busy mashing AI into printers, with a surprisingly good (really!) use case. Having recognised browser and spreadsheet printouts are a disaster, HP claims it will use AI to reformat them for old-school paper, leaving you just the "desired text and images". There's a chatbot you can ask to adjust things in a conversational manner. (And confuse with rants when your printer fails to connect for the 500th time.) That said, who knows whether it'll remove the right bits, or where this will all end? Maybe AIs will start talking to each other and leave humans out of the loop entirely. Cue: HP's AI 'reworks' your documents in increasingly deranged ways and flings them at Meta's AI, which immediately shares them with your friends. You protest you didn't write them, but your face is there as proof. Even though you are, for some reason, sitting in a forest of lace with Dame Judi Dench, who has an unusual number of extra fingers.

Meta Is Putting AI Images on Your Facebook and Instagram Feeds, With Personalized Pictures

Meta AI has about 500 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at Connect earlier this week. You may now see AI-generated images of yourself on your Facebook or Instagram feeds as Meta tests new content. Meta told Axios on Friday that users can opt out of a new "Imagined for You" test that creates AI content based on a user's interests, even incorporating their likenesses. For example, users can imagine themselves in new settings, as royalty, or as an astronaut, and share the images that Meta AI creates of them with their network. You "can be the star of your own story," Meta stated. The generated images seem to rely on photos uploaded by users, noted The Verge. Meta is also testing adding other AI images on newsfeeds that may not feature users' faces but are still personalized to them. One example image Meta shared shows an enchanted realm with moonbeams. Meta is experimenting with the changes across Facebook and Instagram. The new feature is in its testing stages and it's unclear how many accounts it affects. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about its AI efforts earlier this week at Connect, stating that Meta AI has 500 million monthly active users and is slated to become the most-used AI assistant by the end of the year.