GoKawiilis a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.
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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:
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