And I don’t mean that no one uses it anymore. Like, I knew everyone under 50 had moved on, but I didn’t realize how much the sloppy conveyor belt had taken over our place.
I logged on for the first time in ~8 years to see if there was a group for my neighborhood (there wasn’t). Out of curiosity I thought I’d scroll down the main feed a bit.
The first post was from latest xkcd (a page I follow). next ten posts Not by friends or pages I follow. They were basically thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions. Here’s a sample – mildly NSFW, but I’ve left out some of the lewd ones:
Oh. Again, I don’t follow any of these pages. This is all what Facebook is imposing on me.
I know the problem with spam bots in Twitter/X replies is even worse, but that’s it. News feed! This is the main page of the site! This is the product that defined modern social media!
However, it was not all like that. There was also an AI video of a policeman confiscating a little boy’s bike so he could get a brand new one:
And there were also some dirty memes and jokes, mostly about relationships, like this (admittedly not AI) video sketch where a woman deliberately decides to start a fight with her boyfriend because she’s on her period:
It may not be literally about sex, but I’d classify it as lizard-brain-rot engagement bait, just like those selfies. Meta also gives us some useful ideas for sexist questions we can ask their AI about the video:
Yep, that’s another “aha” from me. Although, to be fair, sometimes the suggested questions feature is very useful! For example, like this post:
Why Is She’s wearing pink heels? What Is her personality? Great question, Meta.
I said these were “mostly” AI-generated. The truth is that it’s hard to tell how good the models are getting these days, and I think some of them may be real people.
Still, some of these are clearly AI. Here’s a bunch of foreign text and a broken logo on the scoreboard in the background:
Hmm, I wonder if anyone noticed it’s AI? Let’s check out the comments and see if anyone said you-
…No problem. (I don’t know, maybe they’re all bots too.)
So: is it something weird with my algorithm?
I mean… maybe? It’s part of the whole thing with these 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 will look like this. But on the other hand, I hadn’t logged in for almost a decade! I hate to think what the feed looks like for some lonely old man scrolling through the lightly dressed AI Goniverse for hours every day.
Did everyone but me know it was like this? I’d seen screenshots of things like a Jesus statue made of broccoli a year or two ago, but I thought that only happened to grandmothers. I had never heard of anything like this.
I wonder if this evolution was less noticeable to people who are logging in every day. Or maybe it only gets so bad when there are no posts from your actual friends?
In any case, I stopped searching when I saw a few more AI-generated photos, but with girls who looked to be around ~14 years old, that made me feel sick to my stomach. Facebook for so long, never mind, until one day I inexplicably needed to use your platform to get updates from my kid’s school.
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