Meta’s New ‘Vibes’ Feed Is AI Slop

Let’s start with something positive about Vibes, the new feed in the Meta AI app that shows short AI-generated video clips. The Vibes feed replaces the previous Discover feed, which was full of conversations with a chatbot that people didn’t realize had been posted to a public feed. That was really bad! A huge privacy headache! We’re all glad it’s been replaced!

[To clarify here, we’re talking about the standalone Meta AI app, which is fairly new. You can also access this via browser at meta.ai, but I’m pretty sure you might be one of maybe four people to ever do that.]

So what is Vibes? It’s an almost endless feed of random AI-generated video clips. For now, the feed doesn’t seem personal — it’s just a random grab bag of videos (according to Meta’s press release, the feed will eventually get personalized).

While theoretically anyone can post to the feed, Meta seeds a decent amount of the videos (look for accounts with the “AI” tag in their bio — that’s a Meta-created account).

So far, the reaction online to Vibes has been, uh, well, pretty negative. The consensus seems to be that Meta sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into hiring the best people in AI, and what they created was a useless and unwanted feed of AI slop.

But I’m not here to tell you what the peanut gallery on X is saying. I’m going to tell you what I think about all this, because I have thoughts, and hey, you clicked.

I will attempt to describe the videos in the Vibes feed, and I’m going to purposely avoid using the term “slop,” even though that is the obvious and most easily understandable way to describe this.

Here are a few examples: A herd of mountain goats running through deep snow. An elephant driving a convertible to Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” A sexy woman in yoga clothes petting a cat. A Viking warrior doing a selfie to the song “Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi.

These kinds of videos are pretty familiar to us all by now as examples of “Wow, AI can do this!” They tend to be surreal (elephant driving a car, for example), but with no deeper meaning or layer. Is it “cool” to see an elephant drive a car? Am I supposed to think, “Wow, elephants can’t drive cars in real life… but now with AI… anything is possible!”

It seems reasonable to assume that the feed is called Vibes because each clip is its own “vibe” — a feeling rather than a story, just a hint of setting with no plot.

I believe AI animation can be interesting and compelling. Harmonie Korrine’s last two films heavily use AI in experimental ways, and while you could argue whether they are enjoyable movies, it’s undeniable that they contain genuine artistic vision and thought, not just slop.

But the Vibes feed is just clips with nothing deeper behind them. The focus of the app seems to be the feed itself, with its sheer volume and randomness — Vikings next to cartoon ducks next to a beautiful woman — displaying a chaotic showcase of AI’s possibilities, rather than an experience you’d enjoy.

Which might just be the point. Meta has spent a brain-melting amount of money on hiring for its AI ambitions, in addition to massive spending on compute and infrastructure in its quest for superintelligence. Perhaps this is just some sort of gesture from the AI team to show something that’s been made that can be consumer-facing.

Look, I would love to come to some counterintuitive conclusion here other than: This is an AI slop feed that no one wants. For now, that is exactly what this looks like.

But there are two parts to Vibes: the first is a slopfeed you can consume, and the second is an AI video tool that you can use for free. I suspect that the Vibes feed exists less for people to consume than to demonstrate the tools. I think the goal here isn’t to give you a new endless feed to scroll, but to get you to be comfortable using Meta AI. That’s slightly less sloppy.