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.
