Meta Is Experimenting With AI-Generated Comments, for Some Reason

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It's no surprise that companies continue to experiment with new AI features. Artificial intelligence has been the center of emerging tech for nearly three years now, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But whether you love generative AI or you find it useless, I think we can all agree that using AI to write Instagram comments is pretty stupid.

And yet, Meta appears to be testing exactly that. As reported by SocialMediaToday, some Instagram accounts are now seeing a new icon to the left of the text field after choosing to leave a comment on a post. When you tap this icon (a pencil with a star), you pull up a new Meta AI menu, which presents a series of comment choices, presumably based on whatever content you happen to be looking at. In one example, the bot offers three choices: "Cute living room setup," "Love the cozy atmosphere," or "Great photo shoot location." Could there be anything lazier than this?

I'll admit: This news took me a bit off guard. I know Meta is comfortable shoving its AI experiments down our throats—often with no way to turn them off. But even as it becomes more difficult to avoid AI-generated content on Meta's platforms, I didn't think the company would offload the "effort" of having to write comments to the bots.

I can't imagine many (or perhaps any) Instagram users are so busy or exhausted that they'd rather scroll through an AI's idea of what to say rather than say something themselves. The human-generated comments on Instagram pages are already low-effort as it is; not to mention, there are too many comments from bots on social media platforms. Do we really want more bots in the comments, only this time sent to us by real people?

We need to stop letting AI make the decisions

This is just an experiment, and likely a limited one at that. For what it's worth, I do not have the option on my Instagram account, so I guess I'm forced to think up my own comments for now. (Or at least open another app to ask a different AI to generate a comment for me.) But this experiment speaks to the current state of AI in tech: offering solutions to problems that don't exist. Writing comments isn't hard, and yet, someone at Meta thought there was a usefulness—a market—for AI-generated comments. They probably want more training data for their AI machine, which tracks, considering companies are running out of internet for models to learn from. But that doesn't mean we should be okay with outsourcing all human tasks to AI.

That's what bugs me most: ceding so many of our cognitive tasks and decisions to the machines. If you're on Instagram, you're already letting the algorithm choose the content you see. Please don't hand over even more decisions to the machines, as low-effort as those decisions may be. If you do see the experiment on your end, I encourage you not to use it; both for your own sake, as well as depriving Meta of any more training data generated by its user base for free.