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.
Take note this does not appear to be an independent study. Tell me I’m wrong?
I was wondering who Facebook was for, good to know AI has low standards
Dead internet theory
The bigger problem is AI “ignorance,” and it’s not just Facebook. I’ve reported more than one Lemmy post the user naively sourced from ChatGPT or Gemini and took as fact.
No one understands how LLMs work, not even on a basic level. Can’t blame them, seeing how they’re shoved down everyone’s throats as opaque products, or straight up social experiments like Facebook.
…Are we all screwed? Is the future a trippy information wasteland? All this seems to be getting worse and worse, and everyone in charge is pouring gasoline on it.
No one understands how LLMs work, not even on a basic level.
Well that’s just false.
You know what I meant, by no one I mean “a large majority of users.”
I did not know that. There’s a bunch of news articles going around claiming that even the creators of the models don’t understand them and that they are some sort of unfathomable magic black box. I assumed you were propagating that myth, but I was clearly mistaken.
Educate my family on how they work then please and thanks. I’ve tried and they refuse to listen, they’d prefer to trust the lying corpos trying to sell it to us
“Your family” isn’t who I was talking about. Researchers and people in the space understand how LLMs work in intricate detail.
Unless your “no one” was colloquial, then yes, I totally agree with you! Practically no one understands how they work.
colloquially, no one enjoys a pedant
*where you think they sourced from AI
you have no proof other than seeing ghosts everywhere.
Not get me wrong, fact checking posts is important, but you have no evidence if it is AI, human brain fart or targeted disinformations 🤷🏻♀️
No I mean they literally label the post as “Gemini said this”
I see family do it too, type something into Gemini and just assume it looked it up or something.
I see no problem if the poster gives the info, that the source is AI. This automatically devalues the content of the post/comment and should trigger the reaction that this information is to be taken with a grain of salt and it needs to factchecked in order to improve likelihood that that what was written is fact.
An AI output is most of the time a good indicator about what the truth is, and can give new talking points to a discussion. But it is of course not a “killer-argument”.
The context is bad though.
The post I’m referencing is removed, but there was a tiny “from gemini” footnote in the bottom that most upvoters clearly missed, and the whole thing is presented like a quote from a news article and taken as fact by OP in their own commentary.
And the larger point I’m making is this pour soul had no idea Gemini is basically an improv actor compelled to continue whatever it writes, not a research agent.
My sister, ridiculously smart, professional and more put together than I am, didn’t either. She just searched for factual stuff from the Gemini app and assumed it’s directly searching the internet.
AI is a good thinker, analyzer, spitballer, initial source and stuff yes, but it’s being marketed like an oracle and that is going to screw the world up.
I agree 😇
Anyone on Facebook deserves to be shit on by sloppy. They also deserve scanned out of all of the money and anything else.
If you’re on Facebook, you deserve this. Get the hell off Facebook.
Dude, I sort of agree, but Facebook has wedged itself into every facet of society. I keep a Facebook account for 2 things: The pictures my kids’ daycare/school posts because their school app sucks ass, and getting announcements from my city for events and/or emergency notices like boil orders or something. It’s not as simple as just walking away for large swathes of people without losing important community functionality. More and more people absolutely hate Meta and barely anyone I know actually uses Facebook for anything other than what I mentioned above. But until governments, schools, companies, etc. get the fuck off of it to a better alternative, it’s not going anywhere.
You’ve made an excellent case and argument for both ditching all traditional, social media, but also that they are all intrinsically shitty and evil.
If you can’t bring yourself to break away from techno fascism, why should I have any pity for you?
I am not responsible for your apathy nor your weakness. When you gargle the balls of fascism, don’t be surprised when others come and point out how shitty that is.
Dude, chill out.
While I agree with your message at a high level (I quit FB several years ago), I don’t think it’s productive to be so abrasive.
It’s generally better to be respectful and convincing if you want to change minds.
Have you ever successfully berated a stranger into doing what you wanted them to do?
Edit: itt: brain, dead, and fascist apologist Facebook Earth, who just refuse to accept that their platform is one of the biggest advent of Nazi fascism in this country, and they are all 100% complicit.
This is some Facebook quality content you’re bringing to us here. It’s so great seeing this kind of posts on my feed first thing in the morning. Shows that it’s not just AI poisoning our social media platforms.
I’ve posted a notice to leave next week. I need to scrape my photos off, get any remaining contacts, and turn off any integrations. I was only there to connect with family. I can email or text.
FB is a dead husk fake feeding some rich assholes. If it’s coin flip AI, what’s the point?
Back when I got off in 2019, there was a tool (Facebook sponsored somewhere in the settings) that allowed you to save everything in an offline HTML file that you could host locally and get access to things like picture albums, complete with descriptions and comments. Not sure if it still exists, but it made the process incredibly painless getting off while still retaining things like pictures.
It still existed when I did the same thing a year ago or so. They implemented it awhile back to try and avoid antitrust lawsuits around the world. Though, now that Zuckerberg has formally started sucking this regime’s dick, I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes away.
Thank you real internet person. You make the internet great.
- From Another Real Internet Person
Wait, you’re not a dog using the internet while the humans are at work?
Also… the tremendous irony here is Meta is screwing themselves over.
They’ve hedged their future on AI, and are smart enough to release the weights and fund open research, yet their advantage (a big captive dataset, aka Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp users) is completely overrun with slop that poisons it. It’s as laughable as Grok (X’s AI) being trained on Twitter.
Meta is probably screwed already. Their user base is not growing as before, maybe shrinking in some markets, and they need the padding to cover it up.
Very true.
But also so stupid because their user base is, what, a good fraction of the planet? How can they grow?
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.
> uses ai slop to illustrate it
Seems like an appropriate use of the tech
The most annoying part of that is the shitty render. I actually have an account on one of those AI image generating sites, and I enjoy using it. If you’re not satisfied with the image, just roll a few more times, maybe tweak the prompt or the starter image, and try again. You can get some very cool-looking renders if you give a damn. Case in point:
😍this is awesome!
A friend of mine has made this with your described method:
PS: 😆the laptop on the illustration in the article! Someone did not want pay for high end model and did not want to to take any extra time neither…
That laptop lol.
You know what they say about Al…
this is ai gen so stop it
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
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.
Im pretty sure chatbots were a thing before AI. They certainly werent as smart but they did exists.
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.
Probably on par with the junk human users are posting
Hmm, “the junk human users are posting”, or “the human junk users are posting”? We are talking about Facebook here, after all.
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
how tf did it take 6 years to analyze 8000 posts
I pretty sure they selected posts from a 6 year period, not that they spent six years on the analysis.
I can’t even fathom how they would go about testing if it’s an AI or not. I can’t imagine that’s an exact science either.
In that case, how/why did they only choose 8000 posts over 6 years? Facebook probably gets more than 8000 new posts per second.
Every study uses sampling. They don’t have the resources to check everything. I have to imagine it took a lot of work to verify conclusively whether something was or was not generated. It’s a much larger sample size than a lot of studies.
I have to imagine it took a lot of work to verify conclusively whether something was or was not generated
The study is by a company that creates software to detect AI content, so it’s literally their whole job
(it also means there’s a conflict of interest, since they want to show how much content their detector can detect)
It’s a much larger sample size than a lot of studies.
It’s an extremely small proportion of the total number of Facebook posts though. Nowhere near enough for statistical significance.
I was wondering how far I’d have to scroll before getting to someone who doesn’t understand statistics complaining about the sample size…
There’s likely been trillions of posts on Facebook during that time frame. Is a sample size of 8000 really sufficient for a corpus that large?
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.
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.
