Mark Zuckerberg’s political enemies still want to ruin him. Is AI his way out?

“I don’t know if we know what’s exactly going to work really well yet, but some things are really promising,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the company’s latest earnings call. “I have high confidence that over the next several years, this will be one of the important trends and one of the important applications.”

Yes, he’s talking about content churned out by computers. Yes, the feedback is already pretty bad.

And as legacy media organizations — like establishment institutions across the board — continue to lose trust and loyalty, millions will default to AI content without even actively choosing against the dwindling supply of human journalists trying to keep them in line.

“I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content which is AI-generated or AI-summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” he insisted. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.”

Very exciting — but for whom? The kind of outlets likely to blame Zuck for Trump didn’t skip a beat. “The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves,” reported 404 Media. “Mark Zuckerberg Pledges to Fill Facebook With Even More AI Slop,” Futurism blared. One Bloomberg columnist went with “Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Feed You More AI Slop.” You get the picture.

And if you’ve followed the disturbing trends of older Facebook users thinking the outlandish AI-made images they’re engaging with are real photographs, you might be inclined to agree.

But as is so often the case in cyberspace, all is not as it seems.

Start with Zuckerberg. The long-embattled tech titan may have spent most of the Biden years in the doghouse with conservatives bummed out by his willingness to drop big “Zuckerbucks” on the 2020 election.

But Zuck found himself in survival mode after Democrats resolved to punish him for Facebook’s friendly treatment of Trump in the run-up to 2016. In the blink of an eye, the Frances Haugen “whistleblower” op was concocted and deployed, the platform all but iced political news content, Zuck hard-pivoted into the metaverse, and, yes, the Zuckerbucks began to flow. And behind the scenes, Zuck rebuilt and bided his time.

Now, thanks to some canny PR, he’s rebranded as a libertarian and made the leap to the AI era. This, it’s apparent, is how Zuck reasons he’ll at last break free of the partisan net woven for him by a vindictive regime and its big-media collaborators.

After all, predictable slop of a different kind flooded the social media zone under the state-sponsored outlets that took over Twitter before Elon came along. It seems like the only content fire hose powerful enough to outblast the censor-sanitized media apparatus is cranked out by computers, not human beings typing away as if they may as well be computers themselves.

That seems to be Zuck’s wager, anyway. If millions still pine for the naive old days of social media when real friends hung out online, maybe the future of social media looks more like using AI content for reference and real life for socialization. At a time when people are starved for authorities they can trust, many will probably prefer AIs to human indoctrinators.

And as legacy media organizations — like establishment institutions across the board — continue to lose trust and loyalty, millions will default to AI content without even actively choosing against the dwindling supply of human journalists trying to keep them in line.

The probable downside is already plain enough — the same one Americans experienced for generations back when cable was king and the internet was something that squealed at you from a tabletop box plugged into your phone line. Four hundred channels and nothing on …

Ultimately, it won’t be easy to trust AI content unless you trust the people behind the AI. Right now, on one side of the politics of social media, you’ve got the left selling themselves as a borg or blob, a collective consciousness of enlightened elites. On the other, you’ve got a handful of famous tech lords selling themselves as can-do visionaries who might not have all the answers but at least can get us out of the current rut.

Those aren’t the choices you’d want when trying to select a source of spiritual wisdom, but as they stand at the close of 2024, it’s easy to see how the momentum of public sentiment could point away from the crew that’s ruled our headspace for the past four years — and toward the tech titans who aren’t trying to take down Trump.