Alex Heath from The Verge spoke to Mark Zuckerberg after Meta connect and there are numerous takeaways from it. I recommend you to give it a listen if you are at all interested in technology, or even if you just use Meta platforms. The episode is pretty concise to a few key areas, and posting to Facebook and Instagram is a large part of it.
Below, I pulled out a few telling quotes on what Zuck plans for the future of his services. The ones I found most interesting are the ones talking about Meta AI use on Facebook and Instagram and their aims to show slop in your feed—which I wrote about recently.
I think that they’re
[AI]going to have their own profiles. They’re going to be creating content. People will be able to follow them if they want. You’ll be able to comment on their stuff. They may be able to comment on your stuff if you’re connected with them.
Essentially, what Mark is describing is a bunch of bots designed to keep you on their platform. Much more than simply creating slop for your feed, Meta AI will create fake ‘people’ that leave you comments and try to keep you engaged. It’s clear from responses that Meta are invested in showing you “content that’s generated by an AI system that might be something that you’re interested in”. But they will be identifiable as AI, so there’s that.
When pressed on why users would want this, Zuck gave nothing answers that brushed the question aside.
The sociology that I’ve seen on this is that most people have way fewer friends physically than they would like to have. People cherish the human connections that they have, and the more we can do to make that feel more real and give you more reasons to connect
On training their AI on users' posts to Meta services, Zuck outlined that he does not value anything posted online. Despite users providing the company with their whole revenue stream, from advert views and the actual content that keeps people engaged, he thinks it’s all fair game.
When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it?
I am no copywriter expert, and I am sure that their terms and conditions allow them to train their AI on anything on their platforms. I try to keep my bias against Meta to a minimum, although that’s sometimes impossible, so I am generally harsh on a company pretending to be helpful. However, I do agree with him here with posting things online, especially to things posted to their networks.
I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this.
With that said, I did expect at least a bit of gratitude here. There’s a admittedly minimal movement, trying to ensure the users who are populating networks with their data and content are paid for doing so. Clearly Meta are not one of them, despite launching creator programs, they do not value the things you post very highly.
We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people.
This interview only helped fuel by belief that despite the new image of Zuck, and the hope that by Threads being a bit more open than Facebook or Instagram it signaled a new direction for Meta — the company is still just out for itself. I guess you can’t bemoan a multi-billion dollar company from being focused on making money, we live in a capitalist society based on growth after all, but in the grand scheme of things it’s disappointing.
On one level I understand it. There are only so many people you can get onto Meta platforms. Billions of users are logging on every day, and they are clearly at or very near saturation point. Younger users are shying away from traditional social media, and Facebook in particular, so taking more of existing users time is the only option. The launch of Threads, an app that Zuck sees as being a billion user app, will help in the short term to boost ad impressions, but only whilst the move to AI slop in your feed is ramped up.
I can’t see this going any other way but very wrong for users.