Soon people discovered that Meta’s ghoulish posters had been among us for months, even years. There’s Liv, a “Proud black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” according to its Instagram profile. Add to that Brian, “everybody’s grandpa;” Jade, “your girl for all things hip-hop;” and Carter, a “relationship coach.” I’m sure there are more yet to be discovered.
All four of these posters have pages on both Facebook and Instagram with mirrored content and all four have post histories that go back to September 26, 2023. The accounts have the blue verified check marks and a label indicating that they’re an AI “managed by Meta.” Users can block them on Facebook, but not on Instagram. Users can also message them across all of Meta’s platforms, including WhatsApp.
This is great. If it keeps up my remaining family on FB will give up and I can finally delete my stagnant account.
I avoid any multiplayer game that has bots that you can’t filter out and you have to play with them not knowing that they’re bots. it removes all the font of any game ever
Pretty good article, this stood out for me:
Something about George Romero’s 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall feels resonant today as I look across Meta’s suite of AI-created profiles. The movie’s blue-skinned corpses don’t know they’re dead. They just wander through the shopping center on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.
That’s how many of our social media spaces feel now. Digital town squares populated by undead posters, zombies spouting lines they learned from an LLM, the digested material from decades of the internet spewed back at the audience. That’s what Meta is selling now.
All the ones I’ve seen so far are minorities. This is fucking blackface.
I can’t wait for the AI to reach this level of peak comedy
So brave, as a white man, to speak out as a black woman.
It is so much worse. Humanfacing
Why do you hate de-versity?!
If you don’t engage with them, you are a bigot and social score will be reduced.
You’ve heard of the Dead Internet Theory, now get ready for the UNDEAD Internet Theory!
I don’t need anymore fake content. Real people are doing an amazing job of that already.
This is some legit dystopian shit right here. I almost wish I hadn’t abandoned these platforms years ago, so that I could take this opportunity to do it. I hope that more people wake up to the insidious nature of this company and these services.
Join once. Leave seven hundred and twelvety times.
This all really feels like a desperate attempt to save their dying social networks, just filling their sites with garbage to make it look like they’re not declining
Twitter. Reddit.
They’re doing it to sell to companies to sell positive opinions and politics from “real” people.
It’s great to see them scramble to do anything of monetary value with their platforms. It only seems to be good for fake news and spreading hate (and remembering birthdays).
I also use them to advertise Lemmy
Idk, but I don’t really see that Instagram is dying.
Those apps are legitimately dead. They just haven’t caught up yet.
deleted by creator
The best part is no one is going to leave the platform over this except a small minority of nerds like us. The average person is addicted to social media. Ain’t nothing going to drive them away.
Not even all of us. If I left the platform, I would lose all contact with a significant proportion of my not very large family, who are spread across the globe. I don’t really have another good option if I want to be able to keep in touch with all of them. Incidentally, that includes my own brother.
I do make sure to curate my experience with every meagre tool they give me to do so, however. That’s the best I can do.
Heard that. I hear people complaining about being forced to use WhatsApp to keep in touch with “boomer relatives.” Man I wish WhatsApp was the worse tool I was compelled to keep an account on.
Right. I have relatives in multiple parts of both the U.S. and the U.K. along with Australia and New Zealand. I wish I had another way to keep in touch with them, but I just don’t.
Edit: forgot the ones in Canada and Granada.
Damnn are you folks trying to infiltrate every Commonwealth country or what? Impressive spread you got there.
A lot of the family got the fuck out of Europe after WWII because we’re Jews. But being Jews, we decided to get as far away from each other as possible too.
Haha I’m not familiar with that stereotype, but that’s understandable. My family is full of more of the out-of-sight out-of-mind types.
Apologies on my “infiltrate” joke. I meant it in like an anti establishment way rather than an antisemitic way!
I didn’t think of it that way, no worries.
Its crazy to me that everyone uses that garbage and they’re so surprised when you tell them that you don’t. It’s like you’re doing something wrong.
A fine fellow I met at an open day at a university asked me for my LINKEDIN. I told him that I didn’t use it, and then he asked me for my Instagram. Somehow, my Dad was almost as astounded as him that I had neither. You can probably guess which social media I only really use nowadays.
Fuck AI.
Seems a bit strange to blame AI for this. Meta has always been garbage and using technology to it’s worst effects.
I’m sure your stocks will be fine.
Stocks for what? AI? I can’t have stocks for a technology. I could get stocks in companies that use AI, but the only ones that are on the stock market I’d rather die than support a single penny to since they abuse the technology (and technology in general). But they are not the only ones using the technology. I’m not really a fan of stocks to begin with, profit focused companies are a plague in my opinion.
‘The company is fundamentally evil.’
‘Bootlicker.’
Finally someone said it
I think Zuckerberg fundamentally misunderstands humans. I don’t even mean the memes of calling him a robot or lizzard or whatever, I truly believe being a billionaire in a tech bubble from a young age severely harmed his notion of his own species to the point of being pathological.
People don’t seem to realize that powerful people are all the same as us; they eat, they poop, they get dressed, they sleep.
What they have is widespread recognition and resources, and enough people that listen to them and care about what they do.
Zuckerburg or Putin or Trump or anyone else in power cannot physically implement everything they want done. It takes lackeys and yes men to carry out their wishes. Sure would be nice if everyone would just be decent and quit listening to them.
He was already a weirdo before the money, well adjusted people don’t create face match or whatever he called it
Bonus: Elon “fuck yourself in the face” Musk pretending to be shocked.
I can’t imagine anyone getting me to delete my Twitter account faster than Elon Musk did
Question: SNS stands for social network services, but if this message predates Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, what it was? MySpace or msn Messenger?
I think he meant SSN.
He meant just sn.
Facebook at that time was not collecting social security numbers (nor are they currently, I don’t believe.
I mean, he had a point, particularly at the time.
There’s a whole thing in sports psychology about what happens when you give kids millions of dollars. Not only that but they are the top in the world at what they do. They were raised to believe they are a special breed of human. It’s not just the top pros who get multi-million dollar contracts. It can happen to the kids who don’t even make it pro too. It mindfucks a person.
I’ve been saying for a long time this kind of thing happens in tech too. I grew up with a lot of guys who’ve made various levels of success in tech from average guy to multi-millionaires. It happens. They really do live in another reality. I don’t think it’s much different between the pro-sports bubble and the tech bubble. They live and breath tech. It’s their whole life. Replace tech with sport. Not much different.
One notable difference is that sports actually recognizes this phenomenon. It’s a known studied field of psychology. They make an effort to engage athletes in the community and stuff. Things that keep individuals grounded in reality.
I don’t think such things exists for tech. If anything they believe whatever latest antics they’re up to is what helps the community and helps themselves keep in touch with reality. Because what the world needs is one more world changing app, another bright idea for a startup that is totally making the world a better place and absolutely not strip mining human sanity for profit.
It’s what drives most billionaire mentalities: elite projection.
They think that what they want must be what everyone wants. They believe that what’s best for them is best for everyone as long as they believe it to be morally okay for their own interests.
For a billionaire that regularly isolates himself from not just society, but also his own company’s employees, having fake profiles where computers do the communication instead of a human, go along and agree with whatever you say, remain eternally unoffensive, and exist solely to increase engagement doesn’t seem like a bad idea, since it seems almost like what he’d want for himself.
I agree he’s a weirdo, but this isn’t engagement per se, it’s to make money. If someone seems legit and is saying how awesome a product is, people will buy stuff. Meta will create a persona for businesses for a price. Meta wouldn’t let people go rogue and create their own, they want to sell the service.
I don’t like Zuck, but he did not misunderstand humans. He’s just 2 steps ahead of you. Kids go on https://c.ai right now and playfully chat with AI posing as various pop culture characters or professions. While this generation grows up, Zuck will have a portfolio of made up characters ready and waiting for them on FB, where the humans can live their life without ever befriending another real human and sharing everything with Meta, to be monetized.
Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of “youth these days”?
The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).
The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it’s same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that’s not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.
Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck’s horror show.
LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection,
Eh, maybe, maybe not. 99% of the human-written stuff in IM chats, or posted to social media, is superficial fluff that a fine-tuned LLM should have no problem imitating. It’s still relatively easy to recognize AI models outputs in their default settings, because of their characteristic earnest/helpful tone and writing style, but that’s quite easily adjustable.
One example worth considering: people are already using fine tuned LLMs to copilot tabletop RPGs, with decent success. In that setting, you don’t need fine literature, just a “good enough” quality of prose. And that is already far exceeding the average quality that you see in social media.
I’d entertain your theory, but Facebook is pretty much only kept alive by boomers and Mark’s AI multiverse web 3.0 became a commercial failure, so I don’t think your idea that he understands young people and is just ahead of me holds.
you don’t have to understand people to make this move. just market trends
Metaverse tells me that he doesn’t understand kids or market trends.
Tobacco company selling cigarettes to kids. More at 11.
I still don’t understand why they’re doing it. They can’t possibly think this will be good long-term, can they?
And what’s with the article ending on a note of trying to make it sound bad that reviving nuclear power is a negative thing? If that’s the result of AI slop, then I’d call it a net positive.
If I had to make business sense of this, it might be a pilot for eventual functions like a “sentiment injection” tool to really sway public opinion. With enough halfway believable accounts, not only does the site look more active, but companies/advertisers could pay Facebook to have the bots shovel opinions and products to users in a more overwhelming and coordinated approach than is currently possible with external bots.
Dead internet theory is becoming true.
Bots talking to bots will be 90% of the internet.
In around 2005 or so I went back to look at a Usenet newsgroup which had been a major part of my online life in the 1990s. All the people had gone, but the spambots were still there and the entire group was just bot spam posted at nobody and read by no one. The bots were even replying to one another’s threads. A forum where multiple IRL human friendships had been forged over the years was nothing more than grifting robots spamming at each other.
It’s fully 20 years later and the same shit is going down with a new coat of paint.
I really miss the BBS forums.
I made a load of friends on those.
When I quit reddit, it occurred to me that after 10 years, I hadn’t made a single friend there.
Now many of these remaining BBS forums have a constant battle against bots.
A new odd language will develop that us meatbags won’t understand.
On god no cap frfr
I’d suggest they know growth of the platforms is waning, if not going backwards, but if they create a heap of bots and call them “active users” then the share price won’t go down. That’s the only reason I can think of.
That was my first thought too. It seems like that would be an easy way to get sued by advertisers though. You can’t sell stuff to bots.
“Slop” is such a perfect word for this loose filth with no human effort involved.
How long until the assholes it impacts start trying to stomp the meaning out of it?
