Unveiling Meta's Latest AI Experiment on Facebook Comments

Meta's Testing AI Comment Summaries on Facebook | Social Media...

Meta’s determined to make use of its expanding AI capacity, and it’s going to make you experience it, whether you want to or not. Meta’s latest effort on this front is new Meta AI summaries in post comment streams on Facebook, which sum up the general consensus of what people are saying about that post.

AI Comment Summaries Implementation

As you can see in this example, posted by @cmcalgary on Threads, Meta’s AI comment summaries are now appearing at the top of some post comment streams, and provide an overview of what people are saying about that update.

YouTube’s testing out the same, with AI comment summaries that separate the discussion into topics. X also has similar, in the form of Grok summaries for trending news stories, which are based on posts in the app (available to X Premium subscribers).

Impact on User Experience

Meta’s comment summaries are essentially the same as the Grok version, though at the individual post level. On the plus side, you can provide feedback on these overviews and note their accuracy. However, this AI element seemingly detracts from the core offering of social media apps, which are designed to facilitate human reaction.

Sure, reading through every comment is going to be tedious on some popular posts, and having a summary of the general view could make it a bit easier to get an understanding of how people feel. But most Facebook users aren’t surveying public opinion, they’re looking to engage and interact at an individual, per comment level.

User Feedback and Considerations

It remains to be seen whether this AI feature will provide value to users. If you prefer not to use Meta’s AI comment summaries, you can turn them off in the app.