Meta is putting AI front and center in its apps, and some users are annoyed

Meta’s artificial intelligence-powered assistant is suddenly everywhere in its flagship apps, and some users are not thrilled.

The company announced late last week that its assistant, Meta AI, would now be integrated into Facebook feeds as well as in the search bar across its biggest platforms. It's also now available in at least a dozen more countries.

But users quickly expressed annoyance at Meta AI’s sudden integration into the search function on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Clicking on the blue send button in the search bar on Instagram and Facebook now opens Meta AI instead of the typical search results, leading to confusion for some users. Tapping on search suggestions with the circular blue Meta AI icon will also trigger the AI assistant. (Users can still search by hitting enter instead or by tapping on results with the gray magnifying glass icon.)

Complaints began rolling in throughout the weekend, many appearing to come from frequent Instagram users who noticed the change immediately.

Michael Taylor, 29, said he was trying to find a band’s Instagram account Friday when he tapped on a suggested search result, which prompted Meta AI to pop up with a chat message. He later posted on X that the change “made their search function so much worse.”

“I think it’s trying to find a solution to something that wasn’t a problem,” Taylor said, adding, “If I go on Instagram for banana bread recipes, I’m looking for a reel, not a wall of text that may be a collection of data from different recipes.”

Meta has invested heavily in its AI efforts, and while they may not have generated as much buzz as OpenAI's ChatGPT, the company claims its new, open-sourced Llama 3 can compete with the best models of the moment. Also on Thursday, the company said it would introduce the model for use on a variety of platforms, including Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud.

"We believe these are the best open source models of their class, period," the company said in a blog post. "In support of our longstanding open approach, we’re putting Llama 3 in the hands of the community. We want to kickstart the next wave of innovation in AI across the stack—from applications to developer tools to evals to inference optimizations and more."

The move to make Llama 3 "available for broad use" while also putting its Meta AI assistant into the hands of so many users could be the largest rollout of generative AI technology ever.

But that does not meant users are on board. Some expressed disappointment that it seemed they could turn the feature off, though some online have traded tips about unconventional methods they have found that seemed to work. A Meta spokesperson confirmed that, as of now, there is no official way to disable Meta AI.

“Meta AI aims to be a helpful assistant and is in the search bar to assist with your questions,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “You can’t disable it from this experience, but you can search how you normally would engage with a variety of results.”

The company Thursday also announced a website for Meta AI, bringing the assistant to the desktop. Users can ask the chatbot to find coming events, recommend restaurants or “imagine” an artistic rendering based on a text prompt.

Even as Meta struggles to regulate and consistently label an influx of AI-generated content on its platforms, it has also leaned into AI-powered functionalities. It first began introducing its AI assistant in beta last year before it became fully available in the U.S. Its platforms have also rolled out AI stickers, AI image editing and AI characters modeled on influencers or celebrities.

One person used TikTok to unleash her frustration at “whoever at Instagram [Meta]” is behind the change. The video quickly racked up more than 100,000 likes and hundreds of comments from users expressing similar vexation.

“I’m gonna save a seat for you in hell, because I’m gonna drag you down there myself,” the user said in her viral video. “Give me back the regular search function.”

And it’s not just Instagram users who are annoyed. In the public Facebook group “Middle Aged And Boomers United,” a post lamenting the change on Facebook accrued 13,000 positive reactions within a day.

“Dear Meta AI, I do not want to ask you anything, so if you could just give me my search bar back, that’ll be great,” the post read. “Ok thanks, bye.”

Jordan Walsh, 29, is among those who posted their complaints online. He said that as a daily Instagram user, he’s not interested in incorporating AI tools — which he said he often finds “arduous and annoying” — into his social media experience but that he feels it may soon be inevitable.

He said it feels more like a clunky user interface decision, because although Meta AI has not actually replaced the regular search function on the apps, many users mistakenly assume that it has, according to complaints online.

“It does seem like a rhetorical move towards making it so that AI would replace search as we know it, and that’s sort of troubling to me,” Walsh said. “AI is always now in front of us in everything that we do, and this is just another example of that.”