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:

“You are a helpful conversational assistant. The user is responding to a proactive feed card that was shown to them. The card context below provides background on what prompted the user’s message,” followed by what appeared to be references to internal instructions, information, and metadata.

The articles had images attached. A lot of these were harmless — bland mush of cartoony people, landscapes, and food. But some depicted real people, including public figures, and were riddled with errors. “Who really pays for the royal family in 2026?” featured two Queen Elizabeth IIs, despite her death several years prior and her existence as only one person.

Around the Queen clones were people who seemed to be approximations of other royals: a vaguely Princess Kate-ish face to the left, a strange attempt at Prince William at the back, and a sort-of King Charles in the middle who bore an exaggerated resemblance to his late father. Other images had usual AI tells like impossible hands and bodies leaning at unnatural angles. One image actually turned out to be a GIF of an older couple dancing and making arm movements no human body could make.

It wasn’t clear whether the app should be able to generate AI images of real people in accordance with Meta’s own, rather opaque rules, but it was. The company has previously said it wants “people to know when they see posts that have been made with AI” and that it automatically adds labels to some user-generated content when AI is detected. Despite this, there was no obvious indication or label in the feed or articles that any material was AI-generated.

Meta declined to answer many of my questions about the feature’s purpose, whether the company considers the output news or fiction, what safeguards are in place, and whether images of real people and public figures comply with its own AI-content policies.

“We’re testing a daily feed that proactively shares tips, content, and recommendations tailored to your interests,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in a brief statement. “The goal is to suggest what’s most relevant to you – such as fitness advice, meal plans, or other insights – before you even have to ask.”

Clayton later sent a nearly identical “updated” statement, mysteriously removing the word “proactively.”

A third statement from Clayton followed later in the day: “This was a test for a limited number of users and it will be deprecated. Meta has no plans to move forward with this feature.”

This leaves me with additional questions. How was this test limited if, besides me, at least three of my colleagues at The Verge had access to the same feature serving AI clickbait? What did “proactively” even mean? And, of course, who asked for any of this in the first place?

Back in 2015, the two-person studio Metanet released N++, a brutally hard 2D platformer that was a decade in the making, building off of previous releases dating back to the freeware Flash title N. At the time, cofounder Raigan Burns issued some famous last words: “We hope it’s not another 10 years before we come up with a game.” But now here we are, more than a decade later, and N is getting another sequel. And this time the focus is on multiplayer.

The new game is called, absurdly, N Plus Infinity Times Two. Whereas N++ was meant to be the ultimate single-player version of the N concept, this game is described as “the ultimate virtual couch party game with a low skill floor and no skill ceiling.” That means the same slick, acrobatic platforming action and gorgeous graphic design-inspired visuals, but now built around playing competitively or cooperatively with pals across a handful of different modes. It’s launching on the PS5, Xbox, Switch 2, and PC at some point in 2027.

The duo at Metanet was up to a few different things over the last 11 years. In addition to uprooting from Toronto to Montreal, they’ve been prototyping ideas for a few potentially bigger projects, and last year released a 10-year anniversary update for N++. But then, “We started getting the ‘let’s take another crack at it’ bug in 2022,” Burns tells The Verge.

The studio operates in an unusual way, at least compared to most of the game industry. Despite having two hits in N+ and N++, Metanet hasn’t grown or scaled up in any way. And the reason comes down to the way they make games: It simply takes a lot of time to find a game idea that’s worth pursuing as a commercial project. “We’ve resisted doing something that would compromise our ability to keep iterating and prototyping until something good shows up,” says Burns.

“It’s important to feel that magic,” cofounder Mare Sheppard adds. “That’s what’s compelling about making games. That’s when we know that we’re doing it in a way that’s right for us.” Burns has a clear analogy for how they work: “We like being in a band. That’s fun. Being in a lot of meetings and doing a lot of managing: not fun.” This philosophy seems especially prescient given the state of the games industry, where even the biggest hits operate in a way that’s clearly unsustainable.

In the case of N Plus Infinity Times Two — unfortunately I can’t think of a good way to shorten that title — the spark came in part from watching how younger players interact with games. Even when they’re playing solo, kids are typically still chatting with friends on their phones, essentially turning everything into a multiplayer experience. Burns and Sheppard wanted to find a way to marry that idea with the couch co-op experiences they grew up on, which led to revisiting the N concept but with a multiplayer spin.

The two describe making N++ as a grueling experience. If you think the game’s levels are hard, just imagine having to playtest them over and over. Part of the excitement about N Plus Infinity Times Two wasn’t just finding a spin on the formula that would be fun to play, but also to develop. “This one really feels like we’re having fun,” says Burns. “We’re really fluent in this one instrument. So now the fun challenge becomes playing new styles of music we’ve never played before, but with this thing we’re really comfortable with.”

As creative industries from games to Hollywood become increasingly homogenous, Burns also believes that there’s something important about doing work that’s distinct, even if it means revisiting a previous idea, like through the multiple versions of N. It’s similar to titles like Hades II and Silksong: indie-developed sequels that iterated a core concept, but with a fresh angle that made them more than a by-the-numbers follow-up. “Being yourself is more fun and exciting anyways,” Burns explains. “But I honestly think it’s more commercially viable to do something only you can do, because then you have no competition.”

As for what’s next after N Plus Infinity Times Two, the pair obviously aren’t revealing anything just yet. There are a few bigger 3D game ideas kicking around, but those would necessitate some of that scaling up that the studio has so far avoided. What they won’t close the door on, however, is coming back to the idea of N again at some point in the future.

“If we can do something that expresses something new, or lets us see things in a different way, or we get a different perspective on what this game is or how to play it, that’s exciting,” says Sheppard. “I think we no longer think this is definitively going to be the last one. We’ve abandoned that idea. It doesn’t have to be.”