I’d have to say that Facebook is becoming less and less useful. Of the first ten items that I’ve quickly scanned over on my feed, only 2-3 are from people I know posting something about things they are doing or which have grabbed their attention. A couple more are adverts in the form of X (a contact) likes Y (a service) – that’s the side effect of someone I know engaging with an advert and inadvertently splashing it wider. There are a couple of posts related to groups I’m in, but not deeply engaged with and the rest are a mixture of adverts and posts that are hard to fathom.

One thing I’ve noticed about the latter category is that a lot of them seem to be AI generated. For example, for several weeks I’ve often seen variations on an impoverished looking child in what appears to be an African village demonstrating some clever contraption or toy that appears to be made out of ‘rubbish’ like plastic bottles. I tended to scroll past them but, as the pictures have kept on coming, I’ve realised that they contain clues that they are AI generated. Has that been the case for all of them? They quickly get lost in the churn but I suspect that is the case and there are other ongoing series of pictures that also seem to share the same origin method.

Not only do these clutter up my feed but they share the characteristic of being fiction trying to dress up as reality and attempting to grab engagement in various ways that could be summed up as exploitative. Furthermore, even though I’ve been scrupulous not to click on them to look at the comments or to find out more, I’m still getting ‘contributions’ from recognisable sets. If it continues to develop then it won’t be long before any useful information is entirely drowned out by generated nonsense. If Facebook doesn’t spot and address this, it might not be so long before I end up as another ex-Facebook user (a trend which probably contributes to the fact there is so little from real people on my feed anymore).