Meta has a cool new slop feed

The Slop Inside Your Soul

If you didn’t know, Meta recently launched a social feed for AI-generated content. The Verge has called it “nightmarish” and The Washington Post has called it “creepy.” Which, yes, it is both of those things. But it’s also fascinating. I thought journalist Matt Muir had the best take on it, writing on Bluesky, “Seeing the infinite feed of what people have been asking of The Machine. The outputs are horribly banal, but the requests are a weird window into THE (NORMIE) HUMAN SOUL AND ITS DESIRES.”

When I loaded it this morning, it was a lot of posts about Dragon Ball Z and the papal conclave (not in the same post, though, sadly).

Based on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s podcast appearances recently, he’s pretty convinced that this is the future of social media. Though, it’s, more or less, the present of social media, as well.

You no doubt have seen AI-generated content and even AI-generated “memes” on platforms like X and YouTube by now, but the closest current analog to what Meta has built is actually Pinterest, which Garbage Day researcher Adam and I recently discovered is completely awash in AI content. Last month, for Sherwood News, we dug through Pinterest’s own metrics of top performing key words and found every category was absolutely rotten with AI-generated content, with posts oftentimes linking out to websites full of even more AI-generated content. But what Meta has built drops any pretense of a human social network.

Meta’s AI social feed, however, has also given us a genuinely useful glimpse into a world that we desperately need to know more about: What are we all privately doing with AI? It doesn’t seem totally clear that every user understands yet that their queries are public and if they do, they haven’t figured out how to engagement farm with it. And so we’ve ended up with a rare look at what the average person uses generative AI for.

This morning, when I pulled up the feed, there was a lot of your typical bad AI art — I think this one is a fetish thing? — but nestled in there were some other interesting posts. One appeared to be an audio post of a middle-aged woman arguing with the AI. Another audio post I came across was from a man who did 30 years in prison and wanted to talk to the AI about a job promotion he received recently. The post has since been deleted, which adds to my suspicion people don’t understand these are public. Another post I found was from a user trying to figure out how to sign themselves up as a caregiver for their elderly mother.

It’s weirdly intimate stuff. Which, as I wrote on Monday, is part of the hook. According to leaked documents Business Insider got ahold of from Scale AI, the contractor that Meta partnered with for Meta AI, the AI assistant is meant to be “flirty,” but not sexual. The vision here is to use a playful machine to hook users, rather than the engagement of other humans, and lock them into a fully-automated ecosystem that Meta owns.

And as someone who has covered late-stage Facebook extensively, I can clearly see why Meta is experimenting with a purely-AI feed like this. Facebook, and to a slightly lesser extent, Instagram both have a problem. They chased scale in the 2010s and now have a massively global audience that can’t properly communicate with each other. This wouldn’t be a problem if Facebook was still for friends and family, but the COVID era pivot to a TikTok-like entertainment hub has meant a need for increased or, at least, uniform standard of content. Semi-professional-ish posts and videos that can keep people logged in. So what do you do with three billion aging users, the majority of which don’t speak the same language or, perhaps, can even read, and might not be able to afford editing programs like Photoshop or Premiere? Well, an AI that can generate images and videos and take audio prompts solves this. In fact, Meta AI solves every problem Facebook has right now. A platform with no need for third-party links, where the content moderation is baked into the content itself, an app that, again, as I wrote on Monday, if you can make it addicting enough, people might pay you directly to use it. A financial proposition for a company with 3.98 billion monthly active users across all their different apps so mouth-watering and irresistible that you almost sympathize with their decision to commit so fully to something so grim and ugly and insane as this.

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A Very Serious Food Reviewer

@joeishungrybite

Arby's New Quarter Pound Brisket Sandwich Review * Cedric's Sweet BBQ Sauce * Joe is Hungry #fyo #fyoupage #foryou #foryoupage #foryoupage... See more

I came across this thanks to X user @wyermush, who described it as, “the greatest food reviews I’ve ever seen,” and, yep, that is exactly right.

JD Vance Likes The Star Wars Prequels Because Of Course He Does

This post on X from Vice President JD Vance was in response to a post from right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec who decided to celebrate May the Fourth by complaining about the Disney Star Wars sequels. A good reminder that these guys have a big wheel of bull shit they like to spin whenever they can to rile up their digital armies of lonely men.

It should not be surprising to anyone that our vice president, who used to blog about Garden State on LiveJournal, has bizarre opinions about media that are frozen in the 2000s, but Vance’s prequel endorsement does pose a real risk to prequel revisionism, as X user @coopercooperco pointed out. Xillennials and Gen Z have spent years trying to argue that the Star Wars prequels are good, actually, and someone as sauceless as Vance — even to right-wingers — publicly saying they’re good could derail the entire thing. Sad.

In other presidential media consumption news, President Donald Trump said this week that he wants to reopen Alcatraz prison. Which is a problem for many reasons, the biggest one being that it’s currently a museum and national park. But beyond the logistics of such an idea, the more important question is where did the idea come from?

Well, according to X user @Mollyploofkins, Clint Eastwood’s 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz was playing on local TV stations in Florida over the weekend. Did the president see something on TV and decide it’s national policy now? Well, that’s literally how he spent his entire first term governing, so, yes, probably.

Memeing Our Way Into A Nuclear Apocalypse

It shouldn’t surprise me anymore that politicians are live-memeing wars. By my estimate, this became the new normal with the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But it’s still very off-putting! Even if we are living in a world where the US government is making state-sponsored fancams of immigrants being sent to a foreign gulag. But regardless, I am still very nervous about the way the current conflict in Pakistan and India — two nuclear powers, mind you — is playing out online.

The Indian Army’s official X account is posting things like “justice is served,” complete with image macros celebrating last night’s airstrikes. While Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Asif is posting things like the video above, which is, uh, pretty intense!!

K-Pop Fans Had A Weird Met Gala

Lisa, K-Pop idol and star of the most recent season of White Lotus, attended the Met Gala this week and generated quite a bit of controversy. I will not be linking to posts about it, for reasons that will become very obvious in just a second, but X users became convinced that her underwear featured a picture of Rosa Parks on it. Which, if that were true, would, yeah, probably be a very weird and bad decision. And it wasn’t totally impossible to believe considering some of Lisa’s past decisions when it comes to race.

As one user wrote about the ensuing discourse, “‘Rosa Parks’ and ‘pussy’ have been in far too many tweets in the last 10 mins. The damage K-Pop has done to society is irreparable.” Though, the drama did give us an incredible K-Pop stan crash out, as one user seemed to think Rosa Parks was some kind of pop star and that Lisa was being “dragged” by her stans.

The designer behind Lisa’s outfit told Page Six that her underwear did not feature Rosa Parks’ face on it, but, instead, a picture of his neighbor. Which is, honestly, weirder, I think!

Pope Crave Goes To The Vatican / “Old Man Yaoi”

Conclave/Catholicism fan account Pope Crave is currently reporting live from Vatican City as the papal conclave begins. Which is certainly a sentence.

I’ve had a tough time finding the words to explain the very bizarre fandom reaction to the conclave, but I think I finally came across a post that sums it up quite nicely. As X user @hailtherethere wrote, “The ‘wow I wanna watch this movie’ to ‘old man yaoi enthusiast’ to ‘watching a live broadcast of the real life conclave mass while opening 10 wiki tabs’ pipeline is so real and so scary.”

“Yaoi,” for those not in the know, is the Japanese term for manga depicting man on man romantic and, more often than not, sexual love. And, yes, there is A LOT of Conclave yaoi out there. In my experience, the Korean-language accounts on X are posting the filthiest stuff.

In a strange bit of media collapse, not only are real life cardinals watching Conclave to prepare for the real conclave, but now, Conclave fans are shipping real life cardinals they way they were making “old man yaoi” of the fake cardinals from the movie. Got all that?

A Good Met Gala Look

Some Stray Links

• “Should Your Newsletter Be a Podcast?” (I’m quoted in this!)

• “Top Trump Crypto Buyers Vying for Dinner Seats Are Likely Foreign, Data Shows”

• “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”

• “Family uses AI to create video for deadly Chandler road rage victim's own impact statement”

P.S. here’s Central Park, but with mud.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***