Meta, don’t make my Instagram feed worse with custom AI
I had to read the news about a half-dozen times before it fully sank in: Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, is experimenting with integrating custom AI content into our Instagram and Facebook feeds. These photos, created by the AI assistant Meta AI, will be “based on your interests” and could potentially “show you so you can be the star of your own story and share your favorites with friends.”
As a reviewer of AI image generators for CNET, including Meta AI, I can tell you this: This is a terrible idea.
Meta isn’t calling it the biggest AI news of the day, which is perhaps understandable considering today’s Meta Connect event dropped a lot of AI news. Meta AI is getting a new voice feature that lets you change the voices of different celebrities, better video dub translations, and new visual upgrades that let it “see” and edit your photos. On the hardware side, Meta dropped the new Meta Quest S3, Meta Ray-Bans, and Orion AR glasses.
A lot is happening. But this news, buried at the end of his press release and completely left out of the keynote address, is important and we need to talk about it. We especially need to beg Meta not to let this experiment result in a real update.
As AI content generation services get better, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to escape the deluge of AI content (aka sloppiness). It’s also becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish real photos from AI photos. I’ll admit to being quite impressed with Meta AI’s Imagine feature, which acts as an AI image generator built into the chatbot. But that doesn’t mean I want my feed to be filled with weird images of me as an astronaut or something.
This is an example of what these AI-generated recommended posts might look like.
Earlier this year, Meta started labeling AI-generated content , which was a great idea. But it wasn’t a perfect tool, and photographers were getting AI labels for images that were edited, not AI-generated. The new recommended posts would get a similar label that reads “Imagined for you.” But labels are too easy to miss, which is why I’m still concerned that the rollout of this update will further blur the line between what’s real and what’s AI. And that’s really the last thing we need, when misinformation and disinformation are easier than ever to create convincingly, 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 whether we can expect AI posts to appear while it’s in testing, but we had not received a response at the time of publishing. We do know that US users can’t opt out of having publicly shared posts used to train their AI models.
Mark Zuckerberg said The Edge that adding AI content to social feeds is the next “logical step” for social platforms. But I honestly can’t think of an AI graphic that’s so funny, relevant, or otherwise worthwhile that it makes up for all the potential problems it could cause. Meta has spent so much time convincing us that if we want to use Meta AI, we can find it everywhere — even where we don’t want it, like in Search. Why do we need it in our feeds, too?
My Instagram feed is already a mess, mostly clogged with random accounts I don’t follow recommending content I might like. I have to click through at least three ads to get to a single story from someone I follow. And I’ve accepted it, especially since it’s still my primary online social hub. But the overall user experience of scrolling through Instagram and Facebook has gone downhill over the past 10 years. We’ve long since moved past the original purpose of connecting with friends and family, much to the disappointment of some users, myself included. Adding AI-generated recommended content to the mix feels like it will be the final nail in the coffin of my Instagram feed.
