Meta’s artificial intelligence summarizes some of Facebook’s quirky comment sections

If you’ve been using the Facebook app lately, you may have noticed Meta’s AI injecting itself into the comment sections with summaries of what people are saying. Considering how crazy Facebook comment sections often get, it’s not strenuous to imagine how absurd some of these summaries turn out to be. (By the way, this isn’t the first time Meta’s AI has appeared in the comments section: 404 Media I noticed him posing as a parent in a Facebook group).

After viewing the screenshots of the feature shared on Threads AND Reddit, I decided to check out the comment sections on my Facebook app. I found AI summaries appearing in many of the posts I checked – unbalanced responses and so on. One of AI’s summaries on the store closure post read: “Some commenters attribute the store closure to ‘wokeness’ or poor selection, while others point to the increase in online shopping.”

Another Facebook post from Vice about Mexican street wrestlers prompted a summary of the comments section, which stated that some people were “less impressed” with the performance and called it a “moronic way of begging”. The AI ​​also picked up on some of the lighthearted jokes people were making about bobcat sightings in the Florida city. “Some were delighted with the sighting, with one commenter hoping the bobcat remembered the sunscreen.”

It’s still unclear how Meta chooses which posts to display comment summaries on, and the company didn’t immediately respond Edgerequest for comment.

Either way, the summaries don’t really contain anything that I would find useful (unless you like vague ideas of what random people have to say) – but it may support you identify posts where the comments section has become too toxic to bother wrap your head around scrolling.

AI summaries have also raised privacy concerns because Meta feeds user comments into its AI system to generate them. Over the last week or so, many Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union and the United Kingdom received a notification informing them that Meta would be training its AI on their content. (Data protection laws in both regions require Meta to disclose this information.) While Meta will allow these users to object to their data being used to train artificial intelligence, Meta the process is not that simpleand the company does rejected some users requests.

Here in the US, Meta’s privacy policy page claims the company uses “information shared across Meta products and services” to train the AI, including posts, photos and captions. Meta allows you to request the correction or deletion of personal data used to train AI models, but this only applies to information from third parties. Everything else seems to be fair game.