Meta is determined to harness its expanding AI capabilities, and will let you experience it whether you want to or not.
Meta's latest effort in this area is to surface new Meta AI summaries in Facebook post comment streams, which summarize 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 will now appear at the top of some posts' comment streams, providing a synopsis of what people are saying about that update.
Will it be helpful? Maybe. Probably not. I mean, you'll probably want to actually scroll through and see for yourself what people are saying. That's the whole point of being social, right?
But if you want to skip the hassle and just get the gist of the actual conversations and interactions within the app, Meta’s AI comes to your rescue. Another process that you don’t actually need or want becomes available for your ignorance.
YouTube is also testing a similar feature, with AI-powered comment summaries breaking down discussions by topic.
X has a similar feature, in the form of Grok summaries of trending news articles based on posts within the app (available to X Premium subscribers).
Meta's comment summaries are essentially the same as the Grok version, albeit at the individual post level, so in practice I don't think they'll really make a huge difference to your Facebook experience.
On the plus side, you can provide feedback on these summaries and record their accuracy.
But as this example shows, I’m not sure we really need an AI summary that explains why some people prefer hot climates over cold ones.
Again, this is another AI element that seems to undermine the core functionality of social media apps, in that they are “social” and designed to prompt a human response.
Sure, reading every comment on a popular post can be tedious, and a summary of overall views might help you understand how people feel, but most Facebook users aren't looking to poll public opinion – they want to engage and interact, and they can only do that at the individual comment level.
Actually, I don't know why Meta would want to implement this, since the majority of engagement on Meta comes from comments, and it seems like a bad thing if people start reading summaries instead and stop commenting themselves.
I don't know, I haven't seen it, but maybe this will provide value to others.
Thankfully, you can turn off Meta's AI comment summarization within the app.
