Not everything needs AI – least of all your Instagram and Facebook feeds

Enough people already have trouble separating fact from fiction on social media. But Meta has decided it’s going to make things even worse. How? AI. Specifically how? By dreaming up Meta AI slop that it will inject directly into your Instagram and Facebook feeds. Sometimes with your actual face attached.

When reading this news, I wondered if I was in the grip of a fever dream. I had my first bout of covid in August. Perhaps I remained in its thrall, in that barely coherent state that occurs when a virus is kicking seven shades out of your immune system. But no. Meta’s plans are real. Unlike all the garbage the company plans to splatter all over your feeds, like projectiles from a manure gun.

Meta explains this is all part of its plan to use AI to “help you get things done, learn, create and connect with the things and people that matter to you”. Which apparently means being able to “imagine yourself as a visually stunning video game character” or creating images of a place where “moonbeams dance across a forest of lace, where trees and flowers are woven with intricate beauty, and tiny glittering diamonds sparkle like stardust within every delicate fold”. 

Make it personal

To clarify at this point, you are also not in the grip of a fever dream. The words above are quoted verbatim from Facebook’s news article. It explains a system is being tested which will create Meta AI images “just for you”, based on your interests or current trends. I can only assume, based on the article, that Meta thinks user interests centre on being away with the fairies, in every sense. On the plus side, Meta has at least confirmed you have to approve your face being stapled to its AI slop, and can remove AI images from your feed.

Up until the day you can’t, of course. Meta has form when it comes to making weird and flat-out bad decisions regarding social media. In fact, it’s making more here, because ‘enchanted realm’ images aren’t even all of the new AI stuff. The same post outlines how Meta AI will have its own voice that you can set to be an uncanny valley Dame Judi Dench. And that Meta will attempt to auto-translate and auto-dub Reels into your language, even syncing people’s lips to match. Which I’m sure won’t be terrifying to watch and horrifying to experience when inevitable translation disasters occur. 

This all feels a long way from what social networks used to be. 

Print-ARGH

Facebook was once about keeping up with friends. Instagram was where you went for great photos, even if too many were of people’s lunch. Today, both networks feel far beyond any golden age, ruined by Meta’s insistence that you see what it wants you to rather than what you want to. But at least authenticity remained in your feeds. Now even that is threatened. 

Still, it’s not all bad news on the AI front. HP’s busy mashing AI into printers, with a surprisingly good (really!) use case. Having recognised browser and spreadsheet printouts are a disaster, HP claims it will use AI to reformat them for old-school paper, leaving you just the “desired text and images”. There’s a chatbot you can ask to adjust things in a conversational manner. (And confuse with rants when your printer fails to connect for the 500th time.)

That said, who knows whether it’ll remove the right bits, or where this will all end? Maybe AIs will start talking to each other and leave humans out of the loop entirely. Cue: HP’s AI ‘reworks’ your documents in increasingly deranged ways and flings them at Meta’s AI, which immediately shares them with your friends. You protest you didn’t write them, but your face is there as proof. Even though you are, for some reason, sitting in a forest of lace with Dame Judi Dench, who has an unusual number of extra fingers.

• Related: Why I’m excited about an anti-AI iPhone camera app that does less, not more