Facebook is absolutely cooked
Source: Hacker News
Revisiting Facebook after 8 years
I logged on for the first time in about eight years to see if there was a group for my neighborhood (there wasn’t). Out of curiosity I scrolled down the main feed.
The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow. They were basically all thirst‑traps of young women, mostly AI‑generated, with generic captions. Here’s a sampler — mildly NSFW, but I left out a couple of the lewder ones:
Yikes. I don’t follow any of these pages. This is all just what Facebook is pushing on me.
AI‑generated content in the feed
It wasn’t all like that, though. There was also an AI video of a policeman confiscating a little boy’s bike, only to bring him a brand‑new one:
And there were some sloppy memes and jokes, mostly about relationships, like this (admittedly not AI) video sketch where a woman decides to intentionally start a fight with her boyfriend because she’s on her period:
Meta’s AI prompt suggestions
Meta even gives us some suggested questions we can ask their AI about the video:
That’s another “yikes” from me. To be fair, sometimes that suggested‑questions feature is pretty useful! For example, with this post:
Why is she wearing pink heels? What is her personality? Great questions, Meta.
More AI‑generated images
I said these were “mostly” AI‑generated. The truth is, with how good the models are getting these days, it’s hard to tell, and a couple of them might be real people.
Here’s one with a bunch of alien text and mangled logos on the scoreboard in the background:
I wondered if anyone had noticed this was AI, so I checked the comments:
…never mind. (Maybe those are bots too.)
Reflections on the algorithm
So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm? Maybe. That’s part of the whole thing with algorithmic feeds; it’s hard to know if anyone else is seeing what I’m seeing.
On the one hand, I doubt most (straight) women’s feeds would look like this. On the other hand, I hadn’t logged in in nearly a decade! I hate to think what the feed looks like for some lonely old guy who’s been scrolling the lightly‑clothed AI gooniverse for hours every day.
Did everyone but me know it was like this? I’d seen screenshots of stuff like the “Jesus‑statue‑made‑out‑of‑broccoli” slop a year or two ago, but I thought that only happened to grandmas. I hadn’t heard it was this bad.
I wonder if this evolution is less noticeable for people who log in every day, or if it only gets this bad when there aren’t any posts from your actual friends.
In any case, I stopped exploring after I saw a couple more AI‑generated pictures of girls who looked about 14, which made me sick to my stomach. So long, Facebook—see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid’s school.