In a remarkable turn of events that underscores the oddity of our times, Meta’s AI slop factory, which has failed to captivate audiences, may soon launch its own app and shift to a freemium model.
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The Rock, shirtless and captured in a three-quarter pose, belting out Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice, which samples the riff from Under Pressure, garnered 2,408 likes. A tousled-haired baby with chubby cheeks and an infectious smile energetically mimicking Connie Francis’s Baby received 5,634 likes. Donald Trump, immaculately coiffed and captured in profile, solemnly playing a soothing harmonica tune reminiscent of a scene from Red Dead Redemption, earned just 24 likes.
None of these vertically filmed sequences offer any significant appeal or provide the dopamine rush that platforms like TikTok or YouTube Shorts deliver to engage what little available brain capacity we have left. Fortunately, none of these clips actually exist. All were generated using Meta Vibes and have gone virtually unseen by anyone on this planet.
The Fleeting Illusion of Takeoff
Initially rolled out in the United States in September 2025 and later expanded to Europe, Meta Vibes has struggled to attract an audience. According to Business Insider, which accessed internal data from the company, this feature within the Meta AI app—capable of generating a ten-second clip from scratch or remixing an existing one—had only 2 million daily active users by November last year. A significant portion of its audience came from India, one of Meta’s largest markets outside the US, and Brazil. In Europe, the Discover feed, where these AI-generated ‘social-friendly’ clips accumulate, was only visited by 23,000 users daily, three days after its launch.
Mark Zuckerberg and the Prophecy of the Third Era
It’s worth noting that, compared to the 3.5 billion monthly active users across Meta’s ‘family of apps,’ which includes WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, the audience for Vibes is negligible. However, this does not stop Mark Zuckerberg from indulging in triumphalism and persisting with products that no one wanted but in which his company has heavily invested.
In October, he hinted to investors about a third era of social networks dominated by artificial content, following the era of sharing among close friends and the one dictated by the creator economy. He sees a future for Vibes in this new era. “I believe Vibes represents a new type of content made possible by AI, and many opportunities to create unprecedented formats will present themselves in the future,” he said, as reported by The Verge. He reiterated this vision weeks later, at the end of the fourth quarter: “We started with text, moved to photos as phones incorporated cameras, then to video as mobile networks sped up. Soon, we will witness a burst of new formats, more immersive and interactive, made possible solely through AI advancements.”
A Financial Gamble on AI That Concerns Investors
It’s regrettable that a production like Meta Vibes exists, where brilliant engineers labor to convince us to use tools trained on copyrighted works, which promote misinformation, encourage compulsive scrolling, stifle creativity, and consume vast resources. It’s even more regrettable that such a harmful product might be forced upon us for economic reasons, a scenario that becomes more plausible as weeks pass.
For months, the California-based company, notably lagging in generative AI, has been aggressively spending to catch up. Operational expenses surged by $7 billion over the year, while investments nearly touched $20 billion, primarily aimed at recruiting talent and building infrastructure to support its ambitions. Despite remaining largely profitable, these massive expenditures for an uncertain return on investment are starting to concern investors, especially as Zuckerberg has indicated he will not reduce spending, and his previous venture into the metaverse showed he had no qualms about squandering billions. Two days after the annual results were published, Meta’s stock plummeted by 12%, as reported by TechCrunch.
A Fiasco Soon to be Valued and Monetized?
Does this financial hole prompt Meta to reconsider the future of the feature, or perhaps quietly bury it? Not at all. In February, according to the newsletter Platformer, edited by specialist journalist Casey Newton, we learned that Vibes would soon have its own app. Meta believes the concept has enough potential to stand alone from its conversational agent, which boasts 1 billion users. “Following the initially encouraging results of Vibes within Meta AI, we are testing a standalone app to capitalize on this momentum,” the company justified to TechCrunch. What momentum, exactly? Meta did not provide further details, merely stating that Vibes was showing “good results.”
A Contagious Escalation
By aggressively pushing its technology, sometimes against all logic, and promoting the idea that AI Slop represents the future of social networks, Meta fuels, just as OpenAI does, a bidding war and a technology race that no one asked for and that arguably shouldn’t be happening. And the effects could spread well beyond its own applications, which already host content cross-posted from Vibes.
If YouTube is taking measures to curb the spread of artificially manufactured content, other players are opening the floodgates. OpenAI had already bet on Sora 2, albeit with fleeting success. ByteDance, long cautious about AI, is now more permissive on TikTok and has even developed its own video generation technology, Seedance 2.0, whose first productions have widely circulated on social media. We are far from seeing the end of The Rock rapping Vanilla Ice.
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Jordan Park writes in-depth reviews and editorial opinion pieces for Touch Reviews. With a background in UI/UX design, Jordan offers a unique perspective on device usability and user experience across smartphones, tablets, and mobile software.