Seeing that its apps are still full of scams, fraud, and accounts exploiting kids or posting graphic content, Meta has announced it’s beginning to roll out more advanced AI systems to handle the workload, which is increasingly beyond the capacity of humans. It doesn’t mean the novelty is as amazing as the tech giant claims it is.

Meta’s AI support is a collection of AI-powered tools that handle tasks such as reporting dodgy or graphic content, password resets, explaining content takedowns, and handling appeals.

As per the company, these advanced AI systems will be deployed across all Meta apps. That’s because the results are promising: they have already been tested and performed better than humans.

For example, one AI tool detected and mitigated 5,000 attempts to scam users into revealing their passwords every day. According to Meta, human teams couldn’t detect those scams.

Another tool helped to reduce the number of reports users submitted about fake celebrity profiles by over 80%. Yet another doubled the detection of adult sexual solicitation content.

Efficient tooling, but is it new?

“While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drug sales or scams,” Meta explained in a blog post.

The company believes that the AI systems can detect more violations with greater accuracy, better prevent scams, respond more quickly to real-world events, and reduce over-enforcement.

It all looks great. Meta says its AI can also “prevent an account takeover by noticing it was suddenly accessed from a new location, the password was changed, and edits were made to the profile.”

Those changes “look harmless to a person reviewing the account, but AI was able to recognize them as a threat.”

Of course, this sounds a little weird because numerous security products have been flagging “impossible travel” logins as likely cyberattacks.

And when Meta brags about improved detection of fake ads leading to spoof sites, it’s worth remembering that the company has more than once been indifferent to the issue.

Overall, it remains to be seen whether AI will help – but at least they’re trying. Just last week, Meta, together with international law enforcement agencies, dismantled large criminal networks in Southeast Asia that used social media to run industrial-scale online scams.

The company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp said in January that it would spend as much as $135 billion on AI this year, nearly twice the $72 billion it spent in 2025.

The operation removed more than 150,000 fraudulent accounts across Facebook and led to the arrest of 21 individuals linked to organized fraud groups targeting victims worldwide.

Ambitious but struggling

It is, of course, important for Meta and their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to show that their massive investments into AI aren’t going anywhere.

The company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp said in January that it would spend as much as $135 billion on AI this year, nearly twice the $72 billion it spent in 2025.

Zuckerberg said in July he wants to create a “superintelligent” form of AI that would lead to “a new era of humanity,” adding: “The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take.”

So far, so mediocre, though. Last week, The New York Times quoted sources saying that Meta’s foundational AI model, code-named Avocado, has fallen short of the performance of models from rivals like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic on internal tests.

As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado’s release to at least May from this month. The company’s previous model, Llama 4, fell short of expectations last year.

Meta is not giving up, of course. As the company looks to offset its costly AI efforts, it is now allegedly planning massive layoffs that could affect 20% or more of its workforce.

On Wednesday, Meta also announced the shutdown of Horizon Worlds, its metaverse platform.

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