Originality.AI looked at 8,885 long Facebook posts made over the past six years.
Key Findings
- 41.18% of current Facebook long-form posts are Likely AI, as of November 2024.
- Between 2023 and November 2024, the average percentage of monthly AI posts on Facebook was 24.05%.
- This reflects a 4.3x increase in monthly AI Facebook content since the launch of ChatGPT. In comparison, the monthly average was 5.34% from 2018 to 2022.
Title says 40% of posts but the article says 40% of long-form posts yet doesn’t in any way specify what counts as a long-form post. My understanding is that the vast majority of Facebook posts are about the lenght of a tweet so I doubt that the title is even remotely accurate.
Thanks.
Now do Reddit comments.There’s an AI reply option now. Interested to know how far that is off just being part of the regular comments.
If you could reliably detect “AI” using an “AI” you could also use an “AI” to make posts that the other “AI” couldn’t detect.
Sure, but then the generator AI is no longer optimised to generate whatever you wanted initially, but to generate text that fools the detector network, thus making the original generator worse at its intended job.
I see no reason why “post right wing propaganda” and "write so you don’t sound like “AI” " should be conflicting goals.
The actual argument why I don’t find such results credible is that the “creator” is trained to sound like humans, so the “detector” has to be trained to find stuff that does not sound like humans. This means, both basically have to solve the same task: Decide if something sounds like a human.
To be able to find the “AI” content, the “detector” would have to be better at deciding what sounds like a human than the “creator”. So for the results to have any kind of accuracy, you’re already banking on the “detector” company having more processing power / better training data / more money than, say, OpenAI or google.
But also, if the “detector” was better at the job, it could be used as a better “creator” itself. Then, how would we distinguish the content it created?
FB has been junk for more than a decade now, AI or no.
I check mine every few weeks because I’m a sports announcer and it’s one way people get in contact with me, but it’s clear that FB designs its feed to piss me off and try to keep me doomscrolling, and I’m not a fan of having my day derailed.
I deleted facebook in like 2010 or so, because i hardly ever used it anyway, it wasn’t really bad back then, just not for me. 6 or so years later a friend of mine wanted to show me something on fb, but couldn’t find it, so he was just scrolling, i was blown away how bad it was, just ads and auto played videos and absolute garbage. And from what i understand, it just got worse and worse. Everyone i know now that uses facebook is for the market place.
My brother gave me his Facebook credentials so I could use marketplace without bothering him all the time. He’s been a liberal left-winger all his life but for the past few years he’s taken to ranting about how awful Democrats are (“Genocide Joe” etc.) while mocking people who believe that there’s a connection between Trump and Putin. Sure enough, his Facebook is filled with posts about how awful Democrats are and how there’s no connection between Trump and Putin - like, that’s literally all that’s on there. I’ve tried to get him to see that his worldview is entirely created by Facebook but he just won’t accept it. He thinks that FB is some sort of objective collator of news.
In my mind, this is really what sets social media apart from past mechanisms of social control. In the days of mass media, the propaganda was necessarily a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. Now, the pipeline of bullshit can be custom-tailored for each individual. So my brother, who would never support Trump and the Republicans, can nevertheless be fed a line of bullshit that he will accept and help Trump by not voting (he actually voted Green).
Good on him for not falling for the MAGA bulldust and trying for the third option
It’s such a cesspit.
I’m glad we have the Fediverse.
That’s an extremely low sample size for this
8,855 long-form Facebook posts from various users using a 3rd party. The dataset spans from 2018 to November 2024, with a minimum of 100 posts per month, each containing at least 100 words.
seems like thats a good baseline rule and that was about the total number that matched it
With apparently 3 billion active users
Only summing up 9k posts over a 6 year stretch with over 100 words feels like an outreach problem. Conclusion could be drawn that bots have better reach
each post has to be 100 words with at least 100 posts a month
how many actual users do that?
I have no idea because I don’t use the site
But to say less than 0.0001% just seems hard to believe
I don’t use the site either but 100 words is a lot for a facebook post
this is ai gen so stop it
You know what they say about Al…
If you want to visit your old friends in the dying mall. Go to feeds then friends. Should filter everything else out.
And 58.82% are likely generated by human junk then.
Take note this does not appear to be an independent study. Tell me I’m wrong?
It’s incredible, for months now I see some suggested groups, with an AI generated picture of a pet/animal, and the text is always “Great photography”. I block them, but still see new groups every day with things like this, incredible…
For me it’s some kind of cartoon with the caption “Great comic funny 🤣” and sometimes “funny short film” (even though it’s a picture)
Like, Meta has to know this is happening. Do they really think this is what will keep their userbase? And nobody would think it’s just a little weird?
Well, maybe it is the taste of people still being there… I mean, you have to be at least a little bit strange, if you are still on facebook…
I have a hard time understanding facebook’s end game plan here - if they just have a bunch of AI readers reading AI posts, how do they monetize that? Why on earth is the stock market so bullish on them?
AI can put together all that personal data and create very detailed profiles on everyone, automatically. From that data, an Ai can add a bunch of attributes that are very likely to be true as well, based on what the person is doing every day, working, education, gender, social life, mobile data location, bills etc etc.
This is like having a person follow every user around 24 hours per day, combined with a psychologist to interpret and predict the future.
It’s worth a lot of money to advertisers of course.
As long as they can convince advertisers that the enough of the activity is real or enough of the manipulation of public opinion via bots is in facebook’s interest, bots aren’t a problem at all in the short-term.
surely at some point advertisers will put 2 and 2 together when they stop seeing results from targeted advertising.
I think you give them too much credit. As long as it doesn’t actively hurt their numbers, like x, it’s just part of the budget.
They want dumb users consuming ai content, they need LLM content because the remaining users are too stupid to generate the free content that people actually want to click.
Then they pump ads to you based on increasingly targeted AI slop selling more slop.
Engagement.
It’s all they measure, what makes people reply to and react to posts.
People in general are stupid and can’t see or don’t care if something is AI generated
they measure engagement, but they sell human eyeballs for ads.
But if half of the engagement is from AI, isnt that a grift on advertisers? Why should I pay for an ad on Facebook that is going to be “seen” by AI agents? AI don’t buy products (yet?)
yes, exactly.
Engagement is eyeballs looking at ads
… unless it’s AI masquerading as eyeballs looking at ads.
Also… the tremendous irony here is Meta is screwing themselves over.
They’ve hedged their future on AI, and are smart enough to release the weights and fund open research, yet their advantage (a big captive dataset, aka Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp users) is completely overrun with slop that poisons it. It’s as laughable as Grok (X’s AI) being trained on Twitter.
Meta is probably screwed already. Their user base is not growing as before, maybe shrinking in some markets, and they need the padding to cover it up.
Very true.
But also so stupid because their user base is, what, a good fraction of the planet? How can they grow?
The bigger problem is AI “ignorance,” and it’s not just Facebook. I’ve reported more than one Lemmy post the user naively sourced from ChatGPT or Gemini and took as fact.
No one understands how LLMs work, not even on a basic level. Can’t blame them, seeing how they’re shoved down everyone’s throats as opaque products, or straight up social experiments like Facebook.
…Are we all screwed? Is the future a trippy information wasteland? All this seems to be getting worse and worse, and everyone in charge is pouring gasoline on it.
*where you think they sourced from AI
you have no proof other than seeing ghosts everywhere.
Not get me wrong, fact checking posts is important, but you have no evidence if it is AI, human brain fart or targeted disinformations 🤷🏻♀️
No I mean they literally label the post as “Gemini said this”
I see family do it too, type something into Gemini and just assume it looked it up or something.
I see no problem if the poster gives the info, that the source is AI. This automatically devalues the content of the post/comment and should trigger the reaction that this information is to be taken with a grain of salt and it needs to factchecked in order to improve likelihood that that what was written is fact.
An AI output is most of the time a good indicator about what the truth is, and can give new talking points to a discussion. But it is of course not a “killer-argument”.
The context is bad though.
The post I’m referencing is removed, but there was a tiny “from gemini” footnote in the bottom that most upvoters clearly missed, and the whole thing is presented like a quote from a news article and taken as fact by OP in their own commentary.
And the larger point I’m making is this pour soul had no idea Gemini is basically an improv actor compelled to continue whatever it writes, not a research agent.
My sister, ridiculously smart, professional and more put together than I am, didn’t either. She just searched for factual stuff from the Gemini app and assumed it’s directly searching the internet.
AI is a good thinker, analyzer, spitballer, initial source and stuff yes, but it’s being marketed like an oracle and that is going to screw the world up.
I agree 😇
No one understands how LLMs work, not even on a basic level.
Well that’s just false.
You know what I meant, by no one I mean “a large majority of users.”
I did not know that. There’s a bunch of news articles going around claiming that even the creators of the models don’t understand them and that they are some sort of unfathomable magic black box. I assumed you were propagating that myth, but I was clearly mistaken.
Educate my family on how they work then please and thanks. I’ve tried and they refuse to listen, they’d prefer to trust the lying corpos trying to sell it to us
“Your family” isn’t who I was talking about. Researchers and people in the space understand how LLMs work in intricate detail.
Unless your “no one” was colloquial, then yes, I totally agree with you! Practically no one understands how they work.
colloquially, no one enjoys a pedant
Anyone on Facebook deserves to be shit on by sloppy. They also deserve scanned out of all of the money and anything else.
If you’re on Facebook, you deserve this. Get the hell off Facebook.
While I agree with your message at a high level (I quit FB several years ago), I don’t think it’s productive to be so abrasive.
It’s generally better to be respectful and convincing if you want to change minds.
Edit: itt: brain, dead, and fascist apologist Facebook Earth, who just refuse to accept that their platform is one of the biggest advent of Nazi fascism in this country, and they are all 100% complicit.
This is some Facebook quality content you’re bringing to us here. It’s so great seeing this kind of posts on my feed first thing in the morning. Shows that it’s not just AI poisoning our social media platforms.
Have you ever successfully berated a stranger into doing what you wanted them to do?
Dude, I sort of agree, but Facebook has wedged itself into every facet of society. I keep a Facebook account for 2 things: The pictures my kids’ daycare/school posts because their school app sucks ass, and getting announcements from my city for events and/or emergency notices like boil orders or something. It’s not as simple as just walking away for large swathes of people without losing important community functionality. More and more people absolutely hate Meta and barely anyone I know actually uses Facebook for anything other than what I mentioned above. But until governments, schools, companies, etc. get the fuck off of it to a better alternative, it’s not going anywhere.
You’ve made an excellent case and argument for both ditching all traditional, social media, but also that they are all intrinsically shitty and evil.
If you can’t bring yourself to break away from techno fascism, why should I have any pity for you?
I am not responsible for your apathy nor your weakness. When you gargle the balls of fascism, don’t be surprised when others come and point out how shitty that is.
Dude, chill out.
When I was looking for a job, I ran into a guide to make money using AI:
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Choose a top selling book.
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Ask Chat GPT to give a summary for each chapter.
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Paste the summaries into Google docs.
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Export as PDF.
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Sell on Amazon as a digital “short version” or “study guide” for the original book.
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Repeat with other books.
Blew my mind how much hot stinking garbage is out there.
These people should be shot. With large spoons. Because it’ll hurt more.
They should bring back chain shot.
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