Mark Zuckerberg's Meta AI is one of the most melancholy places online

Meta's standalone AI app was launched in late April, and like many people, my first thought was “huh?” After a little trial, my next thought was, “Oh, no.” A few weeks later, after the first surge in curious new users, my thoughts are now “dear god.”

Meta AI public streams are probably the most melancholy feed I've encountered in a long time. It's full of people sharing intimate information about themselves – thoughts about grief, custody of children, financial distress, and more. And some people don't seem to know what they share will turn into a public feed.

Meta AI apps are bots for casual chats rather than complex tasks like writing code or analyzing large datasets. Also, the most distinctive part of it is the meta AI “discovery” feed, which differs most from ChatGpt and other large-scale language models like Google's Gemini. Shows prompts, conversations, and image output from other users. Think of it like a Facebook feed or an endless Instagram scroll, except for apps dedicated to meta AI.

I don't know why someone would do that want Sharing some of the things I've read – why would someone who isn't as nonchalant and weird as I am, want to see a feed of interactions with strangers' chatbots? Still, people share. Maybe they want to show off something like the image they find particularly cool.

Meta AI's “discovery” feed is full of personal interactions

After its first release in late April, Meta AI feeds were actually pretty much images.

But as I mixed, I noticed some conversations that seemed more personal. For legal advice or special prayers regarding someone asking about vitamin supplements for a 65-year-old woman, or for being fired.

Recently, when I returned to the app, I was looking at more of these personal takes. Some people include a person's phone number and email address when they help draft a letter to a judge in a child custody case.

Did the person intend to share that information with the world? Maybe, but I think they may have clicked the wrong button and didn't understand what they were doing. I could be wrong! Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts told me there is a multi-step process for sharing Meta AI discovery feed and chat history or images. To be clear, conversations with Meta AI are not published by default. As Roberts said, you need to explicitly choose to publish something by clicking “Share” and then clicking “Post.”

A few other things I've seen in the public feed: people who help me write poetry for my wife's birthday, people who ask medical questions, people who seek weight loss tips. And the person who spoke to his wife, who died of cancer.

Other conversations I've seen: I canceled my Experian Credit Monitoring subscription by asking someone to send reminders to them at the end of each month. One woman helped write to her local Elks Lodge after she said she was stopped due to an argument with another member.

So maybe some of those people wanted to read their AI chat to the world. And others, maybe not.

What's more creepy than text or image feeds was the audio feed. If a person uses the voice chat feature, they can listen to a recording of the conversation if they are actually shared.

At least two recordings I listened to seemed to be from someone who didn't realize they had pressed the audio button. One was to have conversations with colleagues about their shift schedule. Another sounded like a pocket dial. Metai continued screaming at the suggestion as the man was having a conversation with the others.

I have discovered that Meta AI discovery feeds are depressing in certain ways. It's not just because the question itself is depressing. What seemed particularly bleak was that some of these people seemed unfamiliar to what they were sharing.

People's real Instagram or Facebook handles are attached to Meta AI posts. I was able to look into some of the real-life profiles of these people, but I felt that I was. I reached out to over 20 people. I heard from someone who said he had no intention of chatting with the bot. (He wanted advice on repairing the car.)

Other users can reply to posts that appear in the Meta AI Discovery Feed. In some particularly personal posts, strangers warned users that the potentially sensitive things they share are commonly seen.

Meta hopes that AI will become the future. But this doesn't feel that way.

Mark Zuckerberg said he thinks AI is extremely important. His company reportedly invested heavily in Scaleai, allowing him to tap on CEO and lead the project with the goal of creating “super intelligence” that is smarter than humans.

Still, the consumer-oriented features using meta AI are uh, uh. Instagram Messenger has a user-generated romance chatbot. There was something unlucky expressed by celebrities (don't ask John Cena about this).

Does Meta really want AI efforts to post perhaps by chance to someone post interactions with meta AI bots in the public feed? In an April unfolding, Meta said the discovery feed is “a place where others can share and explore the ways in which they use AI.”

I have to say that most of the Meta AI discovery feeds are not strict and not overly personal. Most of the time, it's just a stupid image, mixed with requests for other Anodine recipes and questions about how to use this new technology. However, I'm not sure this is even “useful” or “fun” to consider a feed. It's a clutter of irrelevant and random things, and most of it is actually quite boring.

If Meta wants to embrace AI like its users are useful and great, it's difficult to square this in my awful experience with the Meta AI app.