His hair grown out, gold chain resting on a black shirt, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down for an hour long “fireside chat” with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Monday. In the conversation, Zuckerberg dropped an F-bomb, donned a leather jacket, and articulated a vision of the future where social media feeds open the sluice gates and fill user’s brains with AI-generated slop.
The conversation was part of SIGGRAPH, a yearly NVIDIA-hosted conference where the GPU manufacturer publishes a bunch of white papers on the scientific and graphical possibilities NVIDIA’s hardware is soon to bring to the public.
No modern SIGGRAPH would be complete without a lengthy discussion about the hot new tech that’s transformed NVIDIA from a billion-dollar company into a trillion-dollar company: generative AI. If AI is a gold rush, then Huang is the man making a fortune selling shovels to panhandlers.
Zuckerberg loves his shovel. Anyone who’s been on Facebook in the past few years knows they’re seeing fewer posts from their friends and family and a whole lot more posts from spammy image pages that publish endless reams of nightmare-inducing AI-generated images.
Maybe you’ve seen 404 Media’s shrimp jesus? What about the images of legless veterans from a war that never happened under the tagline “Why don’t pictures like this ever trend?” The worst thing I ever saw was a Gal Gadot fan page pushing fake photos of the actress with her eyes rolled to the corner of her sockets and rows of shark-like teeth lining a maw-like mouth. It was Wonder Woman by way of Junji Ito.
At SIGGRAPH, Zuckerberg explained that you’ll be seeing a lot more images like that if you stick around on Facebook. “All the stuff around Gen AI, it’s an interesting revolution,” he told Huang.
Zuckerberg said that, in the past, people wanted to see posts from their friends and family. If Facebook buried the news that your cousin had a baby, you’d be pretty upset, right? This was in a world where most of the content on Facebook was made by friends and family. Zuck said that’s no longer the case.
Facebook’s poor recommendation algorithms can’t keep up with the tide of slop, you see. “The recommendation systems are super important, because now, instead of just a few hundred or thousand potential candidate posts from friends, there’s millions of pieces of content, and that turns into a really interesting recommendation problem,” he said.
“With generative AI, I think we’re going to quickly move into the zone where not only is the majority of the content that you see today on Instagram just recommended to you from kind of stuff that’s out there in the world that matches your interests to whether or not you follow the people,” he said.
Zuckerberg described a world where your social feeds are filled with AI-generated content that’s made on the fly, just for you, based on your interests. “So that’s just one example of how kind of the core part of what we’re doing is just going to evolve, and it’s been evolving for 20 years already,” he said.
The last 20 years of Facebook haven’t led us anywhere good. There’s more information available to anyone than at any time in the history of the human race. Faced with the impossible totality of all knowledge, some of us have chosen to burrow deeper into ourselves. Social media, especially Facebook, changed the world by figuring out how to cater to a person’s exact specific desires.
In Zuckerberg’s vision of the future, even your favorite creators will be pale shadows of themselves. He teased Meta’s AI Studio toolset and explained how it will let creators build AI versions of themselves for public consumption. “There’s kind of a fundamental issue here, where there’s just not enough hours in the day, right?” He said. “So the next best thing is allowing people to basically create these artifacts…it’s sort of an agent, but trained on your material, to represent you in the way that you want.”
Producing quality art for consumption on the internet is a hard task and it’s impossible for humans to keep up with the pace set by generative AI. Zuck’s vision has creators training their own LLMs to take over when they can’t. Every creator would have a mirror image of them, interacting with the public, generating content, and generally keeping up parasocial appearances.
AI content is taking over Facebook. A Stanford Internet Observatory study in March detailed how scam pages, spammers, and other types of accounts are flooding the website with this stuff. Millions of AI-generated images flood Facebook daily and millions of people view and interact with them.
If you want to understand the future Zuckerberg is pitching, spend five minutes on Facebook scrolling through the unending feed of AI grotesques.
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