Facebook has long been filled with feeds of clickbait articles. Now, Meta is making its own clickbait articles with AI.The standalone Meta AI app now has a “For You” section that populates a list of clickbait-style stories for you to read. But the topics, images, and text are all AI-generated — and as questionable as you’d expect from AI-created works.The Meta AI app first launched in April 2025 with its focus on a public “Discover” feed that showed AI-generated images and conversations from other users (who frequently seemed unaware that they were being made public). That’s all disappeared. The app now has a standard chatbot interface, plus a For You page that’s been present for at least a few months, displaying a stream of suggested article prompts that, when tapped, generate entire “stories.”When targeting me, a reporter based in London, the prompts were aggressively British, involving topics like tea, manners, pubs, royals, football — sorry, soccer — and, naturally, the art of queuing. Suggested stories included “A royal butler finally settled the milk first debate” (the tea goes first, apparently), “The psychology of joining a queue without knowing why,” “The anatomy of the devastating British tut,” and “Inside the extreme sport of visiting every UK pub.” Some made even less sense, like “When a bit of a pickle means total disaster.”My colleague, meanwhile, appears to have been placed firmly within the luxury watch aficionado bracket by the algorithm. His feed suggested stories called “My fake Rolex experiment” and “The brutal math behind the Rolex waitlist illusion.”The AI-generated text read like puffy filler, offering little substance beyond repeatedly restating the premise of the prompt. Sourcing was also nonexistent.I tried to track down where these “stories” may have originated. The royal butler tea story appears to trace back to a 2018 BBC Three comedy series called Miss Holland, which follows a fictional beauty queen from a small Dutch town as she travels to Britain and learns “how to be posh and classy” from real former royal butler Grant Harrold. The “Rolex experiment” story, meanwhile, appeared to be a complete fabrication, generated in our chat box as a first-person narrative without a byline, after a bit of usual whirring that happens when a chatbot is generating. Other stories leaned on vague references to unnamed experts or fictional research.When I tapped the same cards more than once, the generated stories stayed within the rough bounds of the prompt and all were clearly versions of the same thing, but slightly different. Typing the same headline into a separate chat produced a completely different response. The clearest giveaway came from my chat history. It showed the hidden, suggested prompts that were supposed to trigger the generation of articles. One began:“You are a helpful conversational assistant. The user is responding to a proactive feed card that was shown to them. The card context below provides background on what prompted the user’s message,” followed by what appeared to be references to internal instructions, information, and metadata.1/5A sampling of “articles” generated by the Meta AI app.The articles had images attached. A lot of these were harmless — bland mush of cartoony people, landscapes, and food. But some depicted real people, including public figures, and were riddled with errors. “Who really pays for the royal family in 2026?” featured two Queen Elizabeth IIs, despite her death several years prior and her existence as only one person.Around the Queen clones were people who seemed to be approximations of other royals: a vaguely Princess Kate-ish face to the left, a strange attempt at Prince William at the back, and a sort-of King Charles in the middle who bore an exaggerated resemblance to his late father. Other images had usual AI tells like impossible hands and bodies leaning at unnatural angles. One image actually turned out to be a GIF of an older couple dancing and making arm movements no human body could make.It wasn’t clear whether the app should be able to generate AI images of real people in accordance with Meta’s own, rather opaque rules, but it was. The company has previously said it wants “people to know when they see posts that have been made with AI” and that it automatically adds labels to some user-generated content when AI is detected. Despite this, there was no obvious indication or label in the feed or articles that any material was AI-generated.Meta declined to answer many of my questions about the feature’s purpose, whether the company considers the output news or fiction, what safeguards are in place, and whether images of real people and public figures comply with its own AI-content policies.“The goal is to suggest what’s most relevant to you – such as fitness advice, meal plans, or other insights – before you even have to ask.” “We’re testing a daily feed that proactively shares tips, content, and recommendations tailored to your interests,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in a brief statement. “The goal is to suggest what’s most relevant to you – such as fitness advice, meal plans, or other insights – before you even have to ask.”Clayton later sent a nearly identical “updated” statement, mysteriously removing the word “proactively.”A third statement from Clayton followed later in the day: “This was a test for a limited number of users and it will be deprecated. Meta has no plans to move forward with this feature.”This leaves me with additional questions. How was this test limited if, besides me, at least three of my colleagues at The Verge had access to the same feature serving AI clickbait? What did “proactively” even mean? And, of course, who asked for any of this in the first place?Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Robert Hart
