Instagram Is Generating Inaccurate SEO Bait for Your Posts
Source: 404 Media
Instagram is generating headlines for users’ Instagram posts without their knowledge, seemingly in an attempt to get those posts to rank higher in Google Search results.
-snip-
“I hate it,” VanderMeer told me in an email. “If I post content, I want to be the one contextualizing it, not some third party. It's especially bad because they're using the most click-bait style of headline generation, which is antithetical to how I try to be on social—which is absolutely NOT calculated, but organic, humorous, and sincere. Then you add in that this is likely an automated AI process, which means unintentionally contributing to theft and a junk industry, and that the headlines are often inaccurate and the summary descriptions below the headline even worse... basically, your post through search results becomes shitty spam.”
-snip-
When I looked at the code for these pages, I saw that Instagram was also generating long descriptions for posts without the user’s knowledge, like: “Seattle’s cosplay photography is a treasure trove of inspiration for fans of the genre. Check out these real-life cosplay locations and photos taken by @mrdangphotos. From costumes to locations, get the scoop on how to recreate these looks and capture your own cosplay moments in Seattle.”
-snip-
“The larger implications are terrible—search results could show inaccurate results that are reputationally damaging or promulgating a falsehood that actively harms someone who doesn't drill down,” VanderMeer said. “And we all know we live in a world where often people are just reading the headline and first couple of paragraphs of an article, so it's possible something could go viral based on a factual misunderstanding.”
Read more: https://www.404media.co/instagram-is-generating-inaccurate-seo-bait-for-your-posts/
There have been news stories in the last week about Google changing news outlets' headlines to make them clickbait: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-replacing-news-headlines-ai-nonsense
Now Instagram is doing something even worse with social media posts - using AI to create a headline and add more text to their users' posts.
Basically turning news headlines and personal posts into mere rough drafts of what they think should be posted, using AI to edit/correct them.
Haven't seen anything yet on Meta using AI to change people's Facebook posts, or Musk having Grok do the same thing on X.
But this has to be stopped now, before social media becomes just a way for these platforms to post what they want while attaching the names of users and news outlets to that changed content.
= new reply since forum marked as read
