Scams, Slop and Shrimp Jesus: Facebook's AI Problem
Liam Murphy explores the bizarre world of AI-generated Facebook content creation, and asks who is really cashing in from it?
The week is dragging on… the tasks you must complete stick in your mind with a frustrating immovability. In a desperate attempt to escape these worries for a short time, you pull out your phone. Social media may be able to stave off this feeling, if only for a few seconds.
As you scroll, a meal appears on your timeline with a recipe attached. Seared cod in a tomato and basil sauce. Deep shining red plays perfectly off of the rich texture of the fish. It looks too good. You save the post – maybe you could make it when you get back home.
Your virtual hunger satiated, you scroll on to find a feat of incredible architectural brilliance. A beautifully crafted outdoor kitchen, fit with oak floors and two huge ovens (how much seared cod could you cook with them?). Beyond the warm frame of the kitchen, a mountain range calls to a need for adventure that has been growing in you with every dreary morning commute or bleary-eyed video meeting.
One more scroll before you return to the pains of everyday life, suddenly the coarse texture of an American mountain range stands out against the static interface of Facebook. Azure blue skies glow endlessly above orange peaks, like something out of a movie.
You decide you’ll go home, cook that meal and book that holiday. You need the time off. You need to experience the real world.
But what if none of the things you’ve seen are actually real? What if that seared cod was never made? What if the outdoor kitchen is genuinely too good to be true? What if those peaks are just a composite approximation of thousands upon thousands of other similar images of peaks dredged by a large data-ingesting program?
This is the new kind of content filling up the infinite receptacle of Facebook. Just how fast is impossible to gauge in any meaningful way. But there is money to be made and people to show you how.
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