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.”
