Meta’s AI Problem: A Growing User Flight
4d 8h ago by piefed.zip/u/Stefan_S_from_H in microblogmemes from media.piefed.zip
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/fozmeadows.bsky.social/post/3mbpy7ukyfs2m
My mom keeps sending me AI videos of animals doing silly things. I tell her it’s AI every time.
Her latest response: “Oh everything’s AI with you” and now she’s mad at me. We’re cooked.
These guys didn't invest a trillion dollars into making fake cute animal videos for your grandmother. If these are the only customers they are getting they are completely fucked.
They're not. I know plenty of people irl who use Ai for everything.
Even my father who's extremely tech savvy and mechanically adept uses it for even the simplest questions.
There are plenty of people that believe ai is an extremely useful tool.
I really hope people remember why they don't let you use a calculator in elementary school and apply that to AI.
You need to know the fundamentals of the topic to make effective use of a tool. If you know nothing on the subject then you can't instruct the tool correctly to produce a good product
I'm also extremely tech savvy (and working in IT for decades). While I sometimes use a llm for assistance the main reason of doing that sparsely is thst it's a slippery slope. You never know when a hallucination might hit you.
So basically misinformation silently crawls in. I don't want that to happen.
so go touch grass.. or is that like so last years?
A little out of context. Although tech is my life, it's never been social media or things like that.
So in a way I am very much permanently touching grass (had to look that up / language barrier).
The psychological issue with llm and hallucination is that humans lose the ability to judge the output, whether you touch grass in between or not.
Verifying all output is almost impossible and at scope completely defeats the purpose.
Yeah, when you don't know a field it help. Your no expert by you can get things done. Technical debt is a later problem.
Send her an ai video of her falling off a couch or walking into a wall.
There have already been scams involving stealing a phone, finding the phone owners grandmother in contacts, and using AI-generated videos and images to pretend like they're holding her granddaughter hostage and getting her to pay.
All the advantages of kidnapping for random with a fraction of the risk.
that's just business as usual
Ouch, that stings. Like the time my coworkers labeled me IT illiterate because I had logged into the work laptop with a different account (and nobody remembered what the usual login was).
Has anyone figured out how money is being made from these shitty videos? There are so many of them and they have to be generating revenue for someone.
Interaction= more reach, more reach = more/better deals for sponsorships/endorsement.
The silly videos may not be monetized, but the algorithm might show you their next post that was paid for
I think the flow is, create a group with many followers by posting slop, then sell the group to someone else so they can rename it and market their product to existing follower base. The product in question usually being some kind of scam.
This one ☝️ and they definitely don’t turn the groups into radical political ones afterwards
So much of the internet is dedicated entirely to identifying and collecting idiots for targeted scams.
The internet changed so much since being a rest from crushing reality of real life, hasn't it?
I think there is ad revenue on some Facebook videos for creators, no?
Haha, that response is the same me and my daughter hear...
Lemmy's refusal to accept AI content will become our greatest strength if we hold to it.
But how can we really tell what’s AI content and enforce it? I feel like there’s only these tiny tell tales that are getting harder and harder to spot. It’s gotten to the point that legitimate content (certain writing styles and images) are getting “called out” as AI even if the image has been around longer than DALL-E has.
Eh, it’ll be fine:
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“Slop” is lazy, obvious spam. This is the vast majority of AI posts. That’s why it’s called slop! Fediverse mods will purge these with glee.
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Fake images have the same problem as (say) a Twitter screenshot: they aren’t a reputable source. We fix this by enforcing good sourcing, which communities should be doing anyway, with or without AI.
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If a little ML is used in a complicated workflow for some art post… is it really slop? At some point it’s just digital art. And these workflows tend to use open weights models that actually support stuff like control nets, whereas Big Tech models tend to be dumb prompting windows, and produce more obvious slop.
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There’s basically no Tech Bro culture here.
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There isn’t as much incentive to Karma Farm on the Fediverse since it’s not actually used for any checks… Still, this is likely the biggest issue. We will just have to look out for farmers, but I think this is doable.
EDIT:
Upon further consideration, we should encourage users to sign up as mods/helpers, and to try and organize communities well. Otherwise they'll get overwhelmed filtering slop posts. And they won't enforce good sourcing, which is already kinda a problem (see: tabloids/twitter screenshots on the front page).
It's doable, but it'd be easy for that to slip away, too.
Wait, my relentless FOSS evangelism doesn't make me a tech bro? Lemmy is one of the techs for which I'm a bro.
You don't wanna be a "tech bro".
When protecting our house from robbers, we just need more security than our neighbors.
When running away from a bear, we just need to be faster than our friend.
When reducing AI posts on a platform, we just need to call it out more than reddit.
Honestly if both lemmy and reddit can keep calling it out that would be great. Let 9gag become the toxic dumping ground.
Hard to tell with writing, but most AI "art" is watermarked. Other AI can see the watermark. Humans can see it with tools. Google has a free one, so do many other sites.
Well the people that label their content as AI generated...
But thats not mandatory. Maybe we ask the devs to make it optional and mods make it mandatory. (Old reddit move)
God I wish this were true. People will so rarely give something up if they’re used to it. My guess is that this person evangelizes privacy and technical literacy to their mom, due to their bsky handle.
I still have my facebook account because it's needed for some very specific things (such as local groups and businesses that use it for mass communication), but I rarely ever open it unless I need to check something very specific. Even then, it is so easy to accidentally start doomscrolling once that page opens. I'll see an update from an old friend, so I'll scroll down and there's someone making some recipe or some shit, I'll keep scrolling, looking for that next friend update, but nope, there's some woodworking video, or resin pour... next thing I know I'm zoned out watching some video where someone is cutting up a shoe and using it as an overly complex way of solving something that isn't a problem. That's usually the point where I snap out of it and hate myself for falling into the trap again.
I don't use FB myself, but a dutch org took Meta to court because eu law states users should be able to select a preferred view (algorithm vs chronological). They implemented this for the eu last year, but it conveniently forgets your setting after you leave the page. The org won, so since the last hour of 2025 users in the Netherlands only have to select once and they remember your preference. It works on IG (which i do use), so i assume it works for FB too. In that case, you could vpn through a dutch server and get rid of this nasty algorithm view. But maybe Meta doesn't want you to do this and built a fix before they released the dutch version.
If you want to try, you can use uBlock to block the FB feed (laptop browser anyway)
Yeah. I know many other people in that age bracket who send "cute pictures" that are, at least to me, clearly generated. They even send physical cards for holidays and birthdays with similar shit on them. It makes me sad to think that even people who create art for and design greeting cards are getting fucked by AI.
Petco had a commercial I saw recently that was clearly AI and I got very sad about it.
Didn't see this coming... /s
One of the main reasons that there is an “AI gold rush” is that tech CEOs, billionaires, and oligarchs see the possibilities it creates for inventing reality and coercing large populations. I’ve long been concerned with not just how social media influences reality, but how people treat the entire digital experience as reality. Too much significance is ascribed to what amounts to flittering colors on a screen. Information drives action; garbage in, garbage out.
“Boomers” are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a lack of social media literacy. In developing countries where social media means the only path to Internet access, commerce, or external support, media literacy is at best a non-sequiter and at worst non-existent:
Abstract: Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree that the social media giant played a role in an explosion of ethnic conflict in 2017 that led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims in Northern Myanmar
https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/
Web 3.0 crashed hard, and the Internet monoliths have gone all in on AI as the next frontier of the Internet. And like the frontier of space, there is a massive wall of killer junk blocking the path and it seems like the only way forward is to launch more junk up there. I just hope we hit saturation before we’re all killed by falling debris.
right wingers are all in AI, because useful propaganda tool thats hard to tell apart from whats real.
Facebook especially forgot that old people who feel confused by something just ignore it...
It's a normal part of aging, we try to hide the mental decline from ourselves, so if we're not able to do something we enjoy, we just stop doing it without even really realizing it.
Some will conciously quit like this old lady, but loads more will just stop checking the app/website without even really noticing they stopped. When they think about using it, their subconscious will convince them not to just to avoid the frustration.
Especially for this age group who were almost 60 when they started using the Internet. They never really had a firm grasp on it, and everyday more and more won't be able to keep up with it
That was why Faux News was so successful. It required zero effort. People would turn it on when they woke up and let it play all day.
Modern internet propaganda hinges on the target being addicted and incapable of stopping themselves for that level of coverage. But they're gonna lose their oldest and most reliable voting demographic
The olds are alright.
Planning to and actually doing it are two very different things.
Social media companies forget the Important Thing. People only use social media to connect to people. Once they don't feel like they are getting that, they won't stick around just for the distraction.
I think you greatly underestimate humanity's need to be distracted.
Distraction is a much more competitive space. Human connection is the one area where social media has an edge. AI content, spam, bot users, etc. erode the basic trust and feeling of connection.
As it gets harder to avoid those, people will seek distraction elsewhere. No one likes being embarrassed.
I think you underestimate the inertia of the masses too. It takes a hell of a lot to get people to willingly jump ship, especially old people who are a very large portion of FB users.
I think it's easy to think that the general population has the same mindset as Lemmy users on this, but the vast majority of people just don't care enough to disrupt their habits.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong and this kills FB, but I won't be holding my breath.
Facebook stopped serving me content about my friends some time around 2014, I stopped using it at this point, but it gained 1.68 billion new users since then.
"Social" media is specifically designed to manipulate human brains into getting addicted.
They will want distraction.
I wish this was my mother's thinking. On the contrary, she and other relatives her age keep sending me slop they consider hilarious or interesting. You guessed, it's neither.
This is a problem for all social media. Eventually every social media site that allows users to post anything will be bombarded to a degree that it will be impossible to find humans. It will be functionally impossible to moderate. And outside of that there will be whole ecosystems of fake AI generated websites will pop up with scams and propaganda. The internet will become a trash fire and people will have no choice but to eat the burning trash or touch grass.
People who were comfortable never leaving their house other than for work will either become schizophrenic zombies or will get cabin fever and desperately seek connection offline.
EDIT: And I say this as someone who doesn't intrinsically hate AI.
I had a job in college that basically amounted to watching a door to make sure no one walked through it in the middle of the night. I burned through a paperback every single night.
I still miss that job.
Because 99.99% of people won't even consider doing that?
Hell a good portion of modern society would legitimately go into withdrawals if they had to delete social media.
I subscribe to the dead internet theory
My mom never thinks about reality in any self-aware context and legitimately believes she has a hard-line directly to Stevie Nicks and megachurch preachers.
I quit trying.
Yeah, I'm just gonna bet that the OP statement doesn't represent anywhere near enough of the general experience. I knew I had lost the battle with my mom when she shared that video of a girl holding a 4ft snowy owl, and when I told her that animal doesn't exist she responded "You don't know everything!"
Same. The tweet (or whatever the blue sky version of that) is wishful thinking.
I know too many old folks who love AI slop. Everything from watching fake puppies save fake kittens from a fire to uploading their old photos and have AI turn it into a video.
My dad has told me that Simon Cowell has died 3 times in the last year... he's addicted to AI slop
They've thought of it. Her market-worth was deemed insufficient so they’ll take the hit and shrug it off. The 18-28 crowd however, should they do anything so bold, they’d jump.
Spoiler: they won’t.
Does the 18-28 crowd even use Facebook anymore? Oh wait they probably do since even if they don’t post on the “main” portion, they still need an account for Facebook Marketplace, and Facebook is often the only source of truth for local businesses and social groups.
they are all on tiktok mostly, youtube. thats why the youngers are so thirsty to become influencers themselves.
All the younger generations not using Facebook?
Instasnap? Talkapp? Whatever.
Right, not Facebook.
even worse kids don't have the correct world view to identify AI vs non AI.
we are the last generation to know the difference. future generations are screwed
They have considered people trying to leave. I remember it being a dick trying to delete my Facebook account.
I just stopped logging into mine. Same result from my perspective.
Occasionally people used to message me there but I haven't logged in more than once a year for years so hopefully they've figured it out by now.
I literally only still have mine because it's the easiest way to get in touch with boomer relatives.
I have mine for mainly facebook marketplace. I wish craigslist didn't die, but there's no other good alternatives for local buying used items.
Is Gumtree not active in your area?
What is that?
https://www.gumtree.com/
Might not be global
Ah, it is labeled as "in the UK." That rules me out. Thank you for the information though!
Still is. Had to use dillo of all browsers to be able to download my data package before leaving since it kept blocking my firefox...
If most people didn't stop because of the algorithms they aren't stopping for Ai.
They've thought about it. They don't care. They have enough of your data to replace you with an AI agent that pretends to be you. Your friends and family will never know the difference. You probably already agreed to it in the Terms of Service.
I think it reflects tech company CEOs not being able to tell what's real people and what isn't. Certainly applies to The Zuckerborg.
she should delete it, youtube reddit is heading that way.
Fakebook
Getting more family finally trying to connect on email and phone this last few months then ever before. Dont use social networks and transfer any photos you want off to places like google drive or one drive.
Yes, transfer them from one huge faceless corporation, to one of two other huge faceless corporations. That'll save those pictures.
Its free and not everyone has money to do otherwise. If you have a option or suggestion would be helpfull....
Is Facebook really a "huge faceless corporation" when it has always been run and owned by a fairly memorable person like Zuckerberg? He's a complete asshole, but not exactly "faceless".
Time to teach her about AI vs human talent
said noones granny ever
How long does it take to verify that your AI multidimensional research is actually correct? What do you do if you are actually expected to understand what it gave you?
Generative vs predictive AI are different. Simple handmade algorithms are even more "something else."
They use AI for all of these because it's a broad term and makes it hard to criticize.
You do know what we generally mean by "AI" tho, no?
What do you mean by multidimensional research? Are you like... making graphics to visualize some statistical analysis or are you prompting an LLM to generate an image? The latter is slop.