Facebook isn't sure it should be human-only forever
The head of Facebook isn't ruling out AI profiles. Also: AI writing is here to stay, what's behind the open vs. closed AI debate, MCP's big update, and more.
I’m back from vacation. Did you miss me? The AI news cycle certainly did not pause while I was trying to unplug in Greece. Oh well.
The first time I interviewed Tom Alison, about a decade ago, he ran engineering for News Feed and drew me a diagram on a whiteboard to explain how ranking worked. He runs all of Facebook at Meta now. When we sat down in Los Angeles on Friday, I asked where AI ends up in what employees still call the blue app.
“We talk about this all the time,” he said. “Should Facebook be a human-only network forever or not? And we haven’t made a strong stance on that.”
I haven’t heard anyone at Meta say that publicly, and it’s telling that Allison left it open in the same week Facebook began rolling out a free verification badge built to prove a person is real. Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past couple of years describing AI-generated content as a third era for social media, predicting that AIs and humans will co-exist in feeds together. Alison’s version is looser.
