Mark Zuckerberg has created the saddest place on the internet with Meta AI’s public feed

Meta’s stand-alone AI app launched in late April, and like many people, my first thought was, “Huh?” After trying it out a little, my next thought was, “Oh no.” A few weeks later, after the initial surge of curious new users, my thought is now: “Dear God.”

Meta AI’s public stream is perhaps the most depressing feed I’ve come across in a long time. It’s full of people sharing intimate information about themselves — things like thoughts on grief, or child custody, or financial distress. And it seems like some people aren’t aware that what they’re sharing will end up on a public feed.

The Meta AI app is a bot more geared to casual chatting than complicated tasks like writing code or analyzing large data sets. And the part that’s most different from ChatGPT or other large language models, like Google’s Gemini, is Meta AI’s public “Discover” feed. It shows off prompts, conversations, and image outputs from other users. Think of it like your Facebook feed, or your never-ending Instagram scroll, except on an app just for Meta AI.

I’m not sure why someone would want to share some of the things I’ve read — nor am I sure why anyone who’s not a nosy weirdo like I am would want to look at a feed of a bunch of strangers’ interactions with a chatbot. And yet, people do share. Maybe they want to show off something like an image they thought was particularly cool.

Meta AI’s ‘Discover’ feed is full of personal interactions

Back in late April, after the initial launch, Meta AI’s feed was indeed mostly images.

But mixed in, I noticed a few conversations that seemed more personal — someone asking about vitamin supplements for a 65-year-old woman, or for legal advice about getting fired, or for a special prayer.

When I checked back on the app more recently, I was seeing even more of these personal takes — some even including a person’s phone number and email address when they asked for help drafting a letter to a judge in a child custody case.

Did that person mean to share that information with the world? Maybe, but I’m guessing they might have clicked the wrong button and didn’t realize what they were doing. I could be wrong! Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts told me there’s a multi-step process to sharing a chat history or image to Meta AI’s Discovery feed. And to be clear, conversations with Meta AI aren’t public by default. Like Roberts said, you have to explicitly choose to make something public by clicking “Share” and then “Post.”

Some other things I saw on the public feed: someone asking for help writing a poem for his wife’s birthday, someone asking medical questions, someone asking for weight-loss tips. And someone who was talking to his wife who had died from cancer.

Other conversations I saw: someone asking the AI to send them a reminder at the end of the month to cancel their Experian credit-monitoring subscription. One woman asked for help writing a letter to her local Elks Lodge after she said she’d been suspended for an altercation she had with another member.

So, maybe some of those people wanted the world to read their AI chats. And others, maybe not.

What I found even more eerie than the text and image feed was the audio feed. If a person uses the voice chat function, you can actually listen to recordings of their conversation if they’re shared.

At least two recordings I listened to appeared to be from people who didn’t realize they had hit the audio button. One was having a conversation with a coworker about their shift schedule. Another sounded like a pocket dial: A man was having a conversation with another person, and Meta AI kept chiming in with suggestions.

I found Meta AI’s Discover feed depressing in a particular way — not just because some of the questions themselves were depressing. What seemed particularly dark was that some of these people seemed unaware of what they were sharing.

People’s real Instagram or Facebook handles are attached to their Meta AI posts. I was able to look up some of these people’s real-life profiles, although I felt icky doing so. I reached out to more than 20 people whose posts I’d come across in the feed to ask them about their experience; I heard back from one, who told me that he hadn’t intended to make his chat with the bot public. (He was asking for car repair advice.)Other users can reply to the posts that show up on the Meta AI Discover feed. On a few particularly personal posts, strangers warned the user that the potentially sensitive stuff they were sharing could be seen by the public.

Meta wants its AI to be the future. But this doesn’t feel like it.

Mark Zuckerberg has said he thinks AI is super important. His company is reportedly making a huge investment in ScaleAI and could tap its CEO to lead a project with the goal of creating “superintelligence” that’s smarter than a human.

And yet, the consumer-facing features using Meta AI are kind of, uh, meh. There are user-generated romance chatbots on Instagram Messenger. There were the ill-fated ones voiced by celebrities (don’t ask John Cena about this).

Does Meta really want its AI efforts to amount to people posting — possibly accidentally — their interactions with its Meta AI bot on a public feed? In its rollout in April, Meta said the Discover feed was a “place to share and explore how others are using AI.”

I have to say that most of the stuff on Meta AI’s Discover feed isn’t grim and overly personal. Mostly, it’s just silly images, mixed in with some other anodyne requests for recipes, or questions about how to even use this new technology. But I’m not convinced that this is “useful” or even “fun” to look at as a feed; it’s a jumble of unrelated, random stuff, most of which actually is pretty boring.

If Meta wants its users to adopt its AI like it’s a useful and great thing, it’s hard to square this with my awful experience on the Meta AI app.

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