AI Sludge Will Destroy Social Media

Image: Badly edited by author

Meta has had a week, and it's only, *checks calendar,* the second week of the year. Talk about starting the new year as you mean to go on.

News broke a few days ago that Meta had been experimenting with AI profiles on Facebook. The story was actually a bit of a nothing burger — the accounts were created over a year ago and had barely been active in the last 10 months due to the fact users mostly ignored them — but it was comments made by a Meta executive got everyone up in arms, and gave us a glimpse into how social media and AI sludge are going to converge.

The executive said that AI character profiles would start to roll out on Instagram and Facebook that "exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do… they'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform."

While most of us know the last thing social media needs is to be swamped with all forms of AI, none of this should have come as a surprise.

We already knew this was on the cards. In this nicely choreographed interview following the launch of the Orion headset prototype back in September, Zuckerberg blatantly said the company was going to experiment with putting AI-generated content on feeds —

"Okay, we're showing you content from your friends and creators that you're following and creators that you're not following that are generating interesting things. 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. Now, how big do any of these segments get?"

What I've been puzzling over in the last few days is why Zuckerberg wants to flood his platforms with this slop?

I can't think of a single positive reason why a user should be able to generate videos of people doing stuff they didn't do, put themselves in places they didn't visit, create profiles of people who don't exist, or whatever other dumb use case. I see even less benefit in posting this onto social media. What purpose does this content serve? Who does this content serve? In what way does it improve the user experience?

The biggest problem social media platforms have is that generative AI doesn't make them any better. It doesn’t improve functionality. It doesn’t improve utility. It doesn’t improve the experience. Almost every use case makes them worse. The overlords that control them are, like most other industries, backed into a corner and forced to put AI into anything and everything to keep shareholders happy and stock prices up, even when it's to the detriment of their own platform. There's no other explanation for the continued AI stuffing. Chatbots, AI suggestions in search, generated profiles, generated content, and celebrity avatars — none of these are net positive for social platforms in terms of helping people connect to other humans. You know, the whole point of them?

I guess that's naive thinking now. The current forms of Facebook and Instagram have long ago moved away from that, morphing into nothing more than cheap, throw-away entertainment channels that can shove ads down our throats. For that purpose, Zuckerberg hopes that flooding the platform with AI-generated content will drive engagement. It's a sad state of affairs, but many people are eating up AI slop for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Oh my god, look at Will Smith eating spaghetti! The bar for engagement is lower than ever, and this could be a calculated bet that turning these platforms into hyperactive, faux-personalized content generators is the key to sustaining the time users spend consuming.

Another possibility is that, when you think about it, there is only a finite number of humans willing to create content at any one time. And in the growth-at-all-costs model, Meta can't afford a slowdown. By providing tools for users to create AI profiles and AI content — and I suspect, one day creating them itself — Meta takes control of this and can juice all its favorite metrics to show it's still growing. Look at how much content was published! Look at how many new accounts were created! Or maybe it's all about ads, and making them even more targeted, using cheap AI content to gather even more data about what users engage with, and then using generative AI to target the ads with more precision. I'm thinking sinisterly here, but imagine your own face or likeness being used in the marketing materials shown to you.

Shudders.

What this latest Meta saga does show is that the future of social media — once heralded as a social "network," a place for humans to connect with other humans — is soon to be a place where humans consume content created by inhuman bots. Feeds filled with endless AI sludge, generated at frightening levels of speed and quantity, constantly refined and optimized to drive engagement. Taken to the nth degree, it may even become a platform where this content engages with itself in some kind of death loop.

The only connection that will exist will be to things that don't exist.

The silver lining is that without connection and interaction with real humans, these platforms will offer little in the way of utility. I hope that, once people take their heads out of their asses, they'll realize that feeds of AI sludge serve no purpose to humanity. Once that penny drops, it may lead to a decline in user numbers, a drop in growth, and a collapse of share price. In other words, the death of these platforms as we know them, and the chance to try again with something better.