Mark Zuckerberg wants to feed you more AI slop

Meta's CEO sees promise in flooding people's social feeds with machine-made content. No thanks.

- Parmy Olson

Interiors and photorealistic children holding professional-looking paintings. And Mark Zuckerberg doesn't just expect this flood of machine-made content to continue—he's working to accelerate it.

Unlike the captains of other tech giants who are building AI models and then selling access to them, the chief executive of Meta Platforms has made his free. Meta's Llama 3.2 can generate text and images and is marketed as open source, meaning anyone can modify its code. Software developers have used Llama to make apps that turn personal photos into works of art or to create "personally-tailored" marketing content.

According to Mr. Zuckerberg, these efforts aim to stop a consolidation of control in AI. "What you want to prevent is one organization from getting way more advanced and powerful than everyone else," he said in February. But he offered additional reasoning on Meta's third-quarter earnings call this week: Free AI tools mean more AI slop, a potential boon for his platform.

When an analyst on the call asked about the proliferation of AI apps, the Meta CEO talked about how developers could use Llama to create more AI content that "just makes people's feed experiences better." Here's his full comment, with my own emphasis:

"If you look at the big trends in Feeds over the history of the company, it started off as friends, right? So all the updates that were in there were basically from your friends posting things. And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends...