Facebook and Instagram plan to cram even more AI generated content into users feeds by revamping its chatbot and adding an image generator to feeds, stories, and profile pictures.
Meta announced Wednesday that users will be able to use their voices to talk to Meta AI across all its platforms and have it respond back to them out loud. Users will also be able to choose some celebrity options for responses, including AI voices of Dame Judi Dench, Keegan Michael Key, Kristen Bell, Awkwafina, and John Cena.
“Over the past year, we’ve introduced you to AI experiences that help you get things done, learn, create and connect with the things and people that matter to you,” the company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
“Since then, we’ve continued to build with safety and responsibility at the forefront. Meta AI is on track to become the most-used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year. More than 400 million people are using Meta AI monthly, with 185 million people using it across our products each week. Today at Connect, we introduced new multimodal features thanks to our Llama 3.2 models that make Meta AI and our other AI products more fun, useful and capable.”
Meta also says that it’s begun testing an AI translation tool that will translate Reels on Instagram, with automatic dubbing and lip synching.
Despite its myriad failings, tech companies have been pouring billions and plan to pour trillions into AI. Meta spent $6.7 billion on AI data centers last quarter alone. But for all that money it seems the majority of what trickles down to most users so far has been a toxic sludge of bad information, deepfakes, poorly generated images, and other slop.
With this latest initiative, Meta plans to give users the opportunity to add their own faces to the trough of slop.
“We’re expanding Meta AI’s Imagine features, so you can now imagine yourself as a superhero or anything else right in feed, Stories and your Facebook profile pictures. You can then easily share your AI-generated images so your friends can see, react to or mimic them. Meta AI can also suggest captions for your Stories on Facebook and Instagram.”
In an interview with The Verge, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the addition is a “logical jump” for the company.
“I think there’s been this trend over time where the feeds started off as primarily and exclusively content for people you followed, your friends. And you just add on to that, a layer of, ‘Okay, and we’re also going to show you content that’s generated by an AI system that might be something that you’re interested in’ ... how big it gets is kind of dependent on the execution and how good it is.”
If users on any of Meta’s platforms already want to see a stream of AI generated images though, they don’t have to look far. In fact, it can be difficult to avoid them.
For months, Facebook has been overrun with profiles and pages sharing AI generated images that range from casually funny to just plain weird to downright disturbing. An August investigation by 404 Media revealed that Facebook’s algorithms boost these posts and their creators make money off them through the platform’s Creator Bonus Program, which rewards viral content.
Many of these images are so terrible they’re easily spotted as AI generated, such as this photo of a fleet of trucks laden with things that look like people and flags driving the wrong direction down an imaginary highway.
Others can be a little harder to spot for an untrained or otherwise distracted eye, like this photo of an alleged soldier allegedly coming home from an unnamed conflict.
The images are often accompanied with captions that read things like “why don’t pictures like this ever trend” and random hashtags that might be, were, or may become trending topics. These posts get thousands of shares, comments, and reactions on the platform, boosting their reach further. The comments are usually a dumpster-fire of short messages of approval or disapproval or users pointing out that the images are AI generated, and it’s almost impossible to tell if the accounts posting them are in fact, real people.
Meta is far from the only social media network helping to further enshifity the internet by prioritizing slop. In August, X rolled out its latest version of Grok that contained an image generator. The results were predictable and in some cases, alarming.
For years, almost every social media platform has not only helped bad actors peddle disinformation, but actively prioritized it. Rumors, baseless lies, racist urban legends, and other garbage cooked up and promoted by fascists online have created national crises and moral panics that have made countless people unsafe in their own communities both online and in the physical world. Meta doubling down yet again on AI while simultaneously having a poor track record of trust and safety policies might be the “next logical jump,” but it’s a bad one.
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