John Walker, Kotaku

Rather than because of wifi, the reason this happened is because these so-called AIs are just regurgitating information that has been parsed from scanning the internet. It will have been trained on recipes written by professional chefs, home cooks and cookery sites, then combined this information to create something that sounds a lot like a recipe for a Korean sauce. But it, not being an intelligence, doesn’t know what Korean sauce is, nor what recipes are, because it doesn’t know anything. So it can only make noises that sound like the way real humans have described things. Hence it having no way of knowing that ingredients haven’t already been mixed — just the ability to mimic recipe-like noises. The recipes it will have been trained on will say “after you’ve combined the ingredients…” so it does too.

I would love to know how this demo was supposed to go. In an ideal world, is it supposed to walk you through the preparation ingredient-by-ingredient? If Jack Mancuso had picked up the soy sauce, would it have guided the recipe-suggested amount? That would be impressive, if it had worked. The New York Times’ tech reporters got to try the glasses for about thirty minutes and, while they shared no details, said it was “as spotty as Mr. Zuckerberg’s demonstration”.

I think Walker is too hard on the faux off-the-cuff remarks, though they are mock-worthy in the context of the failed demo. But I think the diagnosis of this is entirely correct: what we think of as “A.I.” is kind of overkill for this situation. I can see some utility. For example, I could not find a written recipe that exactly matched the ingredients on Mancuso’s bench, but perhaps Meta’s A.I. software can identify the ingredients, and assume the lemons are substituting for rice vinegar. Sure. After that, what would actually be useful is a straightforward recitation of a specific recipe: measure out a quarter-cup of soy sauce and pour it into a bowl; next, stir in one tablespoon of honey — that kind of thing. This is pretty basic text-to-speech stuff, though it would be cool if it can respond to questions like how much ginger?, and did I already add the honey?, too.

Also, I would want to know which recipe it was following. A.I. has a terrible problem with not crediting its sources of information in general, and it is no different here.

Also — and this probably goes without saying — even if these glasses worked as well as Meta suggests they should, there is no way I would buy a pair. You are to tell me that I should strap a legacy of twenty years of privacy violations and user hostility to my face? Oh, please.

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Rani Molla, Sherwood News:

While the prerecorded videos of the products in use were slick and highly produced, some of the live demos simply failed.

“Glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence because they let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all of these AI capabilities to make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated at the start of the event, but the ensuing bloopers certainly didn’t make it feel that way.

I like that Meta took a chance with live demos but, in addition to the bloopers, Connect felt like another showcase of an inspiration-bereft business. The opening was a more grounded — figuratively and literally — version of the Google Glass skydive from 2012. Then, beginning at about 52 minutes, Zuckerberg introduced the wrist-based control system, saying “every new computing platform has a new way to interact with it”, summarizing a piece of the Macworld 2007 iPhone introduction. It is not that I am offended by Meta cribbing others’ marketing. What I find amusing, more than anything, is Zuckerberg’s clear desire to be thought of as an inventor and futurist, despite having seemingly few original ideas.

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Emily Price, Fast Company:

Meta’s Threads is on a roll.

The social networking app is now home to more than 400 million monthly active users, Meta shared with Fast Company on Tuesday. That’s 50 million more than just a few months ago, and a long way from the 175 million it had around its first birthday last summer.

What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be. I might be in a bubble, but I cannot recall the last time someone sent me a link to a Threads post or mentioned they saw something worthwhile there. I see plenty of screenshots of posts from Bluesky, X, and even Mastodon circulating in various other social networks, but I cannot remember a single one from Threads.

As if to illustrate Threads’ invisibility, Andy Stone, Meta’s communications guy, rebutted a Wall Street Journal story with a couple of posts on X. He has a Threads account, of course, but he posts there only a few times per month.

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Meta:

Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests.

You know, I think this concept of showing people things they say they want to see might just work.

Meta says this is just one of “several ‘O.G.’ Facebook experiences [coming] throughout the year” — a truly embarrassing sentence. But Mark Zuckerberg said in an autumn earnings call that Facebook would “add a whole new category of content which is A.I. generated or A.I. summarized content, or existing content pulled together by A.I. in some way”. This plan is going just great. I think the way these things can be reconciled is exactly how Facebook is doing it: your friends go in a “Friends” tab, but you will see all the other stuff it wants to push on you by default. Just look how Meta has done effectively the same thing in Instagram and Threads.

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Grace Dean, BBC News:

Ms O’Carroll’s lawsuit argued that Facebook’s targeted advertising system was covered by the UK’s definition of direct marketing, giving individuals the right to object.

Meta said that adverts on its platform could only be targeted to groups of a minimum size of 100 people, rather than individuals, so did not count as direct marketing. But the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) disagreed.

“Organisations must respect people’s choices about how their data is used,” a spokesperson for the ICO said. “This means giving users a clear way to opt out of their data being used in this way.”

Meta, in response, says “no business can be mandated to give away its services for free”, a completely dishonest way to interpret the ICO’s decision. There is an obvious difference between advertising and personalized advertising. To pretend otherwise is nonsense. Sure, personalized advertising makes Meta more money than non-personalized advertising, but that is an entirely different problem. Meta can figure it out. Or it can be a big soggy whiner about it.

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Karissa Bell, Engadget:

Zuckerberg then launched into a lengthy rant about his frustrations with “closed” ecosystems like Apple’s App Store. None of that is particularly new, as the Meta founder has been feuding with Apple for years. But then Zuckerberg, who is usually quite controlled in his public appearances, revealed just how frustrated he is, telling Huang that his reaction to being told “no” is “fuck that.”

It all has a whiff of the image consultant, with notes of Musk.

Everybody knows a corporate executive wearing boring business clothes and answering questions with defined talking points is playing a role. This costume Zuckerberg is wearing is just as much of a front. The billionaire CEO of a publicly traded social media company cannot be a rebel in any meaningful sense.

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Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica in July 2022 in what I will call “foreshadowing”:

Despite all the negative feedback [over then-recent Instagram changes], Meta revealed on an earnings call that it plans to more than double the number of AI-recommended Reels that users see. The company estimates that in 2023, about a third of Instagram and Facebook feeds will be recommended content.

Ed Zitron:

In this document [leaked to Zitron], they discuss the term “meaningful interactions,” the underlying metric which (allegedly) guides Facebook today. In January 2018, Adam Mosseri, then Head of News Feed, would post that an update to the News Feed would now “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people,” which may explain the chaos (and rot) in the News Feed thereafter.

To be clear, metrics around time spent hung around at the company, especially with regard to video, and Facebook has repeatedly and intentionally made changes to manipulate its users to satisfy them. In his book “Broken Code,” Jeff Horwitz notes that Facebook “changed its News Feed design to encourage people to click on the reshare button or follow a page when they viewed a post,” with “engineers altering the Facebook algorithm to increase how often users saw content reshared from people they didn’t know.”

Zitron, again:

When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you to try and think of them less as social networks, and more as a form of anthropological experiment. Every single thing you see on either platform is built or selected to make you spend more time on the app and see more things that Meta wants you to see, be they ads, sponsored content, or suggested groups that you can interact with, thus increasing the amount of your “time spent” on the app, and increasing the amount of “meaningful interactions” you have with content.

Zitron is a little too eager, for my tastes, to treat Meta’s suggestions of objectionable and controversial posts as deliberate. It seems much more likely the company simply sucks at moderating this stuff at scale and is throwing in the towel.

Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:

In late 2021, TikTok was on the rise, Facebook interactions were declining after a pandemic boom and young people were leaving the social network in droves. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg assembled a handful of veterans who’d built their careers on the Big Blue app to figure out how to stop the bleeding, including head of product Chris Cox, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, WhatsApp lead Will Cathcart and head of Facebook, Tom Alison.

During discussions that spanned several meetings, a private WhatsApp group, and an eventual presentation at Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto, California, the group came to a decision: The best way to revive Facebook’s status as an online destination for young people was to start serving up more content from outside a person’s network of friends and family.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

At first, previously viral (but real) images were being run through image-to-image AI generators to create a variety of different but plausibly believable AI images. These images repeatedly went viral, and seemingly tricked real people into believing they were real. I was able to identify a handful of the “source” or “seed” images that formed the basis for this type of content. Over time, however, most AI images on Facebook have gotten a lot easier to identify as AI and a lot more bizarre. This is presumably happening because people will interact with the images anyway, or the people running these pages have realized they don’t need actual human interaction to go viral on Facebook.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Instagram confirmed it’s testing unskippable ads after screenshots of the feature began circulating across social media. These new ad breaks will display a countdown timer that stops users from being able to browse through more content on the app until they view the ad, according to informational text displayed in the Instagram app.

These pieces each seem like they are circling a theme of a company finding the upper bound of its user base, and then squeezing it for activity, revenue, and promising numbers to report to investors. Unlike Zitron, I am not convinced we are watching Facebook die. I think Koebler is closer to the truth: we are watching its zombification.

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