Meta’s determined to make use of its expanding AI capacity, and it’s going to make you experience it, whether you want to or not.
Meta’s latest effort on this front is new Meta AI summaries in post comment streams on Facebook, which sum up the general consensus of what people are saying about that post.
As you can see in this example, posted by @cmcalgary on Threads, Meta’s AI comment summaries are now appearing at the top of some post comment streams, and provide an overview of what people are saying about that update.
Helpful? Maybe. Probably not. I mean, you probably want to actually scroll through and check out what people are saying for yourself, that’s the nature of being social, right?
But if you can’t be bothered, and just want the Cliff’s Notes on actual conversation and engagement in the app, then Meta’s AI is here to save you, with another process that you don’t really need, or want, now available for your ignorance.
YouTube’s testing out the same, with AI comment summaries that separate the discussion into topics.
X also has similar, in the form of Grok summaries for trending news stories, which are based on posts in the app (available to X Premium subscribers).
Meta’s comment summaries are essentially the same as the Grok version, though at individual post level. And really, I don’t see them adding a heap to the Facebook experience.
On the plus side, you can provide feedback on these overviews, and note their accuracy.
But as you can see in this example, I’m not sure that we really need an AI summary which explains that some people prefer hot to cold weather.
Again, this is another AI element that seemingly detracts from the core offering of social media apps, in that they’re “social” and designed to facilitate human reaction.
Sure, reading through every comment is going to be tedious on some popular posts, and having a summary of the general view could make it a bit easier to get an understanding of how people feel. But most Facebook users aren’t surveying public opinion, they’re looking to engage, and to interact, and they can only do that at an individual, per comment level.
Really, I don’t even know why Meta would want to implement this, as comments are where a significant amount of its engagement stems from. If people start reading summaries instead, and stop commenting themselves, that seems like a bad thing.
I don’t know, I don’t see it, but maybe this will provide value to other users.
You can, thankfully, turn off Meta’s AI comment summaries in the app.