“We still don't know what will actually work really well, but some things are very promising,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. announced He spoke at the company's latest financial results announcement. “We are confident that this will be one of the key trends and one of the key applications in the coming years.”
Yes, he is talking about content that is mass produced by computers. Yes, the feedback is already pretty bad.
And as established media organizations (as well as established institutions in general) continue to lose trust and loyalty, millions of people are willing to accept a dwindling supply of human journalists to maintain them. It will default to AI content without even selecting it.
“We're going to be adding a whole new category of content: AI-generated content, AI-summarized content, or existing content that's been aggregated by AI in some way,” he claimed. “And I think that's going to be very exciting over time for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads and other types of feed experiences.”
Very exciting, but for whom?The media, likely to blame Zack for Trump, reacted quickly. “AI will remain depressed until morale improves,” 404 Media reported. “Mark Zuckerberg vows to fill Facebook with even more AI,” futurists exclaimed. One Bloomberg columnist said, “Mark Zuckerberg wants to give you more AI slop.” You get the picture.
And if you've been following the disturbing trend of older Facebook users believing bizarre AI-generated images are real photos, you might agree.
But as is often the case in cyberspace, not everything goes as planned.
Let's start with Zuckerberg. The long-struggling tech giant spent much of the Biden era in the doghouse, amid conservatives demoralized by his willingness to unseat a major “Zuckerback” in the 2020 election. He may have spent some time there.
But after Democrats voted to punish him for Facebook's friendly treatment of Trump in 2016, he found himself in survival mode. In the blink of an eye, Francis Haugen's “whistleblowing” operation was concocted and developed, and his platform was all but gone. Cooling off the political news content, Zuck veered firmly into the metaverse and, yes, Zuckerbucks started flowing. And behind the scenes, Zack rebuilds and bides his time.
Now, thanks to some smart PR, he has been rebranded as a Libertarian and leapfrogged into the AI era. Clearly, this is why Zack believes he can finally break free from the partisan web woven by the vindictive administration and its big media collaborators.
As it turns out, under the state-run media that took over Twitter before Elon arrived, a different kind of wave, as expected, flooded the social media landscape. It seems like the only content firehose powerful enough to defeat a media apparatus sanitized by censorship will be launched by computers, not by humans typing as if they were computers themselves.
Either way, that seems to be Zack's bet. If millions of people are still nostalgic for the simple old days of social media when real friends hung out online, perhaps the future of social media is to use AI content as a reference and draw it from real life. It might be something you use for socializing. At a time when people are hungry for trustworthy authority, many will probably prefer AI to human indoctrination.
And as established media organizations (as well as established institutions in general) continue to lose trust and loyalty, millions of people are willing to accept a dwindling supply of human journalists to maintain them. It will default to AI content without even selecting it.
The possible downsides are already abundantly clear. It's the same experience that generations of Americans have had in the days when cable was king and the Internet was a creaking sound coming from a desk box connected to a telephone line. There are 400 channels but nothing is displayed…
After all, it's not easy to trust AI content unless you trust the people behind the AI. Currently, on one side of social media politics, we have leftists marketing themselves as the Borg or the bloc, a collective consciousness of enlightened elites. On the other hand, there are a handful of famous people who tout themselves as visionaries who may not have all the answers but can at least get us out of our current rut. There are technology companies.
These aren't the options you want when trying to choose a source of spiritual wisdom, but as we stand at the end of 2024, we're wondering how the momentum of national sentiment will change from the crew controlling our headspace. It's easy to see how they might distance themselves from the past four years, and even against the tech giants who aren't trying to bring down Trump.
