Facebook has long been filled with feeds of clickbait articles. Now, Meta is making its own clickbait articles with AI.
The standalone Meta AI app now has a ‘For You’ section that populates a list of clickbait-style stories for you to read. But the topics, images and text are all AI-generated — and as questionable as you’d expect from AI-created works.
When targeting me, a reporter based in London, the prompts were aggressively British, involving topics like tea, manners, pubs, royals, football (sorry, soccer) and, naturally, the art of queuing. Some made even less sense, like ‘A bit of pickle means total disaster.’
The AI-generated text read like puffy filler, offering little substance beyond repeatedly restating the premise of the prompt. Sourcing was also nonexistent. When I tapped the same cards more than once, the generated stories stayed within the rough bounds of the prompt and were clearly versions of the same thing but slightly different.
Meta declined to answer many questions about the feature’s purpose or whether the output is news or fiction, only stating it was a test for a limited number of users. It will be deprecated later in the day.
