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.
This is a pretty sweet ad for https://originality.ai/ai-checker
They don’t talk much about their secret sauce. That 40% figure is based on “trust me bro, our tool is really good”. Would have been nice to be able to verify this figure / use the technique elsewhere.
It’s pretty tiring to keep seeing ads masquerading as research.
damn no wonder i feel so cheap after scrolling a fb feed for an hour
The other 60% are old people re-sharing it.
Ok this made me laugh.
6% old people re-sharing. The other 54% were bot accounts.
Well, there’s also 0.1% who are relatives of old people who are tring to keep in touch with the batty old meme-forwarders. I was one of those until the ones who mattered most to me shuffled off this mortal coil.
I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’d be interested to see what they used to make that determination. All of the AI detection I know of are prone to a lot of false-positives.
8k posts sounds like 0.00014 percent of Facebook posts
It probably is but it’s a large sample size and if the selection is random enough, it’s likely sufficient to extrapolate some numbers. This is basically how drug testing works.
And statistical analysis. The larger the universe, the smaller the true random sample you need
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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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.
In the last month it has become a barrage. The algorithms also seem to be in overdrive. If I like something I get bombarded with more stuff like that within a day. I’d say 90% of my feed is shit that has nothing to do with anyone I know.
If it wasn’t a way to stay in touch with family and friends I’d bail.
A friend told me he saw 16 posts before he saw a post from a friend or page he’d liked.
I’m not surprised. And of those 16 posts how many of them made him mad? Since that seems like the entire purpose of FB anymore. Anger drives engagement. It’s why rage bait works so well. I highly recommend everyone disconnect from Facebook for this reason. Hell Reddit was even going down that path before we all left.
SocialFixer would help.
I’m a big fan of a particularly virtual table-top tool called Foundry, which I use to host D&D games.
The Instagram algorithm picked this out of my cookies and fed it to Temu, which determined I must really like… lathing and spot-wielding and shit. So I keep getting ads for miniature industrial equipment. At-home tools for die casting and alloying and the like. From Temu! Absolutely crazy.
I made the mistake of clicking like on an Indian machine shop (I admired how they made do with crude conditions). Well now I get bombarded with not just those videos but Mexican welding shops, Pakistani auto repair places…
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.
I was wondering who Facebook was for, good to know AI has low standards
Dead internet theory
Keep in mind this is for AI generated TEXT, not the images everyone is talking about in this thread.
Also they used an automated tool, all of which have very high error rates, because detecting AI text is a fundamentally impossible task
Yeah. This is a way bigger problem with this article than anything else. The entier thing hinges on their AI-detecting AI working. I have looked into how effective these kinds of tools are because it has come up at my work, and independent review of them suggests they’re, like, 3-5 times worse than the (already pretty bad) accuracy rates they claim, and disproportionatly flag non-native English speakers as AI generated. So, I’m highly skeptical of this claim as well.
AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.
I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.
“Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.
I have no idea whether the probabilities are balanced. They claim 5% was AI even before chatgpt was released, which seems pretty off. No one was using LLMs before chatgpt went viral except for researchers.
chat bots have been a thing, for a long time. I mean, a half decently trained Markov can handle social media postings and replies
Chatbots doesn’t mean that they have a real conversation. Some just spammed links from a list of canned responses, or just upvoted the other chat bots to get more visibility, or the just reposted a comment from another user.
Im pretty sure chatbots were a thing before AI. They certainly werent as smart but they did exists.
And 58.82% are likely generated by human junk then.
This kind of just looks like an add for that companies AI detection software NGL.
this whole concept relies on the idea that we can reliably detect AI, which is just not true. None of these “ai detector” apps or services actually works reliably. They have terribly low success rates. the whole point of LLMs is to be indistinguishable from human text, so if they’re working as intended then you can’t really “detect” them.
So all of these claims, especially the precision to which they write the claims (24.05% etc), are almost meaningless unless the “detector” can be proven to work reliably.
Thank you. I’ve wondered the same thing. I mean the whole goal of the LLMs is to be indistinguishable from normal human created test. I have a hard time telling most of the time. Now the images I can spot in a heartbeat. But I imagine that will change too.
Not enough attention is given to the literal arms race we find ourselves in. Most big tech buzz is all “yay innovation!” Or “oh no, jobs!”
Don’t get me wrong, the impact AI will have on pretty much every industry shouldn’t be underestimated, and people are and will lose their jobs.
But information is power. Sun Tzu knew this a long time ago. The AI arms race won’t just change job markets - it will change global markets, public opinion, warfare, everything.
The ability to mass produce seemingly reliable information in moments - and the consequent inability to trust or source information in a world flooded by it…
I can’t find the words to express how dangerous it is. The long-term consequences are going to be on par with - and terribly codependent with - the consequences of the industrial revolution.
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…
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me it’s some kind of cartoon with the caption “Best 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…
Engagement is engagement, sustainability be damned.
If you want to visit your old friends in the dying mall. Go to feeds then friends. Should filter everything else out.
You know what they say about Al…
