Meta Envisages Social Media Filled With AI-Generated Users (ft.com)
- Reference: 0175775295
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/12/27/1810222/meta-envisages-social-media-filled-with-ai-generated-users
- Source link: https://www.ft.com/content/91183cbb-50f9-464a-9d2e-96063825bfcf
> The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that [1]helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook
[2]non-paywalled source
, as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience.>
> "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform ... that's where we see all of this going," he added. Hayes said a "priority" for Meta over the next two years was to make its apps "more entertaining and engaging," which included considering how to make the interaction with AI more social.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/91183cbb-50f9-464a-9d2e-96063825bfcf
[2] https://www.pymnts.com/meta/2024/meta-expects-ai-characters-to-generate-and-share-social-media-content/
You mean like right now? (Score:2)
You'd be amazed at how many nubile models on Fakebook are interested in a (very old) Big Hairy Gorilla!!
I certainly was.
You couldn't make it up (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously?
Of course if they forget to put delays into the circuit, AI talking to AI may fill up their data storage very, very fast...
Re: (Score:2)
> Seriously?
> Of course if they forget to put delays into the circuit, AI talking to AI may fill up their data storage very, very fast...
This. The problem with all of the lofty promises of AI are this. AI bots on Facebook having conversations with each other. AI research that references other AI research, leading to the truth being discarded for what AI and other AI and other AI says is truth. No actual humans needed, for either social media or research or music or literature. Just an abandoned internet filled with bots. Machine mental masturbation.
So last stage enshittification? (Score:2)
The stage that comes before a company vanishes? Yep, that squares with Zucks level of insight.
Awesome (Score:3)
I can see it now.
This will do amazing things for teen self confidence - "Even the fake AI characters have more interesting lives than I do!"
Maybe the next "Tide Challenge" will be spread by AIs instead.
Will AI Influencers take all the human one's followers and leave them starving?
Film at 11!
Re: (Score:2)
> Will AI Influencers take all the human one's followers and leave them starving?
We can only hope. I fail to see how all the rampant narcissism, out of control trolling/hate speech/conspiracy theory propogation, and "me too" idiocy that social media drives is in any way beneficial to humanity and if this hastens the on-going spiral of social media content up its own rectum then I'm all for it.
Getting high on your own supply (Score:2)
While Zuck might be all for showing advertising to AI bots, what advertisers in their right mind would pay for that?
Re:Getting high on your own supply (Score:4, Interesting)
My first person experience, and some actual testing/research I did, during the pandemic on Instagram showed that adverstisers were already being defrauded with plumped up advertisement impression numbers. I would regularly get ads for heavy digging equipment, like you use in an open pit mine, or perhaps if you were drilling for oil, or maybe digging a canal or panamax ships.... Digital surveillance was supposed to create highly targeted ads. I'm not the target market for anything like that. I don't have millions of dollars, nor do I do any heavy excavation from my apartment. So, it was fraud. Advertisers were paying for those ads, but I wasn't the target market, and I'm going to say Instagram/Facebook would know that. But who doesn't know that? The advertisers paying for those ads.
Also, IG would tinker with my subscriber list. New people would show up on it that wouldn't follow me... since you can't see any internal numbers or processes at work, you can't legitimately make serious claims about what is going on. I did gather evidence in the form of before after screenshots about subscription numbers, and survey numbers... .they didn't add up. But it was too much work to gather authoritative indisputable evidence, so I let it die.
I suggest that Facebook/IG/Whatsapp is a massive fraud scheme... but it's pretty difficult to prove it.
Re: (Score:3)
> I would regularly get ads for heavy digging equipment, like you use in an open pit mine,
Must.. resist.. the obligatory yo mamma joke.
Well... (Score:3)
I have often thought that ONE AI-generated comment to every article everywhere might be a good thing to do. Because often enough the actually human commenters are incredibly stupid, one-sided, factually challenged, emotional and outright crazy. Just defining a baseline of somewhat balanced, reasonable, elaborate, even "political correct" commentary may be just what the doctor prescribes, fully with pros and cons and bullet points.
Of course this is not what Meta envisages. Meta would use this to beat everything into a lather even faster and more efficiently to generate "engagement" and make everyone even more crazy.
Note: Only when your foam goes over the brim on command you're a good Social Media citizen. And foam is cheap and easy to make. It's easy to drown in foam though, it has very little carrying power but suffocates you perfectly fine.
The breakthrough: (Score:3)
Pointless social media enhanced with advanced pointlessness. Awesome!
Making dead Internet theory reality (Score:3)
NT
I'm sure they're right (Score:2)
And that their crap web site will, indeed, be filled with bots. To the exclusion of all else. AI bots hallucinating garbage for other AI bots to ignore, and hallucinate in return.
Advertisers will lover it.
Sounds workable (Score:5, Insightful)
The goal is to make money off people.
The problem is people are stupid and mean and egotistical, and this doesn't result in maximizing the profit potential.
What if you built an invisible walled garden for each user, and filled it with AI that made that person feel happy enough to keep coming back but unhappy enough to feel incomplete and be suggestible to the right ads? The AI could be constantly manipulating the user's emotions to ensure profits were always optimized over the next quarter!
That is one option. And as disturbing as it may be, it's probably far more benign than what Meta users will actually get.
Advertisers will not pay (Score:3)
Zuckerberg to serve ads to bots. Zuck is an ad man. Probably the most successfull ad man in history. Companies pay him to show ads to people. That’s what his companies do. That’s why they exist. You gotta pay attention to the $$$ if you want to understand reality. His social media sites are merely honeypots to attract eyeballs that will watch the ads. His customers are the people and companies that pay for the ads. The users barely rank higher than cattle on a farm. Moo. MmmmoOOoooo.
And the real customers will NOT pay for ads delivered to bots. Well, they might, if the bots have purchasing power.
I actually sympathise with Zuck a bit on this. He’s been trying for over a decade to do something with his life other than sell ads, but he’s just so damn good at it that everything else he tries flops in comparison. He doesn’t want to go down in history as the geekier version of Don Draper minus all the cool stuff, but that’s most definitely gonna be his epitaph. He’s reached the pinnacle of a mountain that he no longer really wants to be on.
Re: (Score:2)
Make sure your banking information is not on your PC/Phone and only pay in cash /s
And yet when I do that they ban my accounts (Score:3)
Wankers.
Perpetuation of illusion of "Social Network" (Score:1)
If they have an opinion of how their social network should behave like, they'll use AI to make it behave that way.
Eventually, they'll hallucinate, just to perpetuate the idea that it's a live, when no people are really using it anymore.
Ah now I get it... (Score:2)
That explains why when I report cloned accounts of friends Facebook replies with "doesn't go against community standards."
So then why bother with the option of letting us report these accounts?
Post truth age (Score:5, Interesting)
Within the next decade we _will_ reach a point where the _only_ thing that you can be at least somewhat certain of, is what you see with your own eyes in "meat space" - by that, I mean excluding _any_ media.
The alarming thing about this is that we've kinda been in this space already for all of humanities history, it's just that now, there'll be no way to even begin to verify anything outside of immediate physical interactions in your own local space.
It's the speed and volume that's the problem, the reach of media - right in your pocket, beaming into your brain as you doom-scroll.
Right now we're in an age of anxiety - that's been coined by many people and it's just so damn true.
Everything is making people anxious, the news cycle is out of control.
We're headed for the post truth age where nothing is verifiable, which means there's no way to objectively navigate life on a wider scale.
At best, it will result in insular behavior.
"Because I can't trust this information, I'm not even going to participate anymore"
At worst, it results in thuggery. The lowest common denominator, out there to just kick the shit out of anyone who won't accept a version of truth laid down.
So, yeah, Orwellian.
Has anyone noticed that investigative journalism is all but dead?
Hell, journalism which has the potential to enlighten and change things for the better is totally dead.
We are so close to post truth - LLM's are going to push us over the edge into the abyss - after that, there's no going back.
If you have the luxury of being able to, become a luddite and retreat to rural areas, because the very near future is going to suck really badly.
Re: (Score:2)
Disagree
The "post-truth era" will be temporary
Tech will be invented that helps us find truth more accurately than ever before
Re: (Score:2)
> Tech will be invented that helps us find truth more accurately than ever before
Suer, but the question is who will, or better said, can listen to the truth buried by the amount of nonsense by that tine?
Re: (Score:2)
> Suer, but the question is who will, or better said, can listen to the truth buried by the amount of nonsense by that tine?
"Computer. Filter out all messages that aren't signed. Of those that remain, check WoT paths to their signing key and filter out anything more than 7 hops away. Run spam heuristics on remaining messages. Of those which appear to probably be spam, do they have any common keys attesting their identity?"
[Majel Barrett voice] "Working."
[Majel continues] "Frenemy user Sloppy has signed 24 sus
Re: Post truth age (Score:2)
Within the next decade ?
I think you have described what we have now , fairly accurately .
Re: (Score:2)
> We're headed for the post truth age where nothing is verifiable, which means there's no way to objectively navigate life on a wider scale.
We already lived that situation and pretty much survived as a species; it's called "organized religion".
It's terrible from a scientific point of view, as we've known an era where it was possible for the common person to get an education and a reasonable awareness of what was going on; losing that will be hurtful.
But as long as there is a strong feudal chain of command (and certainly they're putting it in place fast), the lower social strata will be fed whatever nonsense is needed to keep them in check, as a
Re: (Score:2)
If investigative journalism is individuals posting photos of a shot down airliner and everyone (everyone who wants to) can see the holes in the fuselage within 24 hours, then investigative journalism is alive and well. If it's a paid professional doing interviews with experts and putting it on the 6 o clock news or website a month later, that still happens, but not on as many things. My youtube feed is full of investigative journalism, I just saw one on the browser extension "honey" stealing commissions and
Re: (Score:2)
question everything.
I'll never see them. (Score:2)
I have been using the [1]https://www.fbpurity.com/ [fbpurity.com] extension for years now so I literally only see the friends and followed pages posts when I use Facebook.
If they force me to see bot content then I'll just stop using it.
[1] https://www.fbpurity.com/
Scrap it (Score:2)
We are people in here, we do NOT need our replacements to go out, put-on virtual trousers in virtual shops. Mess away.
Almost right (Score:2)
Meta Exemplifies Social Media Filled With AI-Generated Users
There, FTFY
Going for gold (Score:2)
..in the olympics of bad ideas.
I predict massive failure, but not before a lot of annoyance as this crap is rammed down our throats.
Motto (Score:2)
> Building the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.
Gonna have to modify that a bit.
Finally.... (Score:1)
Zuck can have some reeal friends.
Oh boy (Score:2)
I can't think of anything less appealing than this- swimming through endless social media swamps inhabited primarily by bots, all clamoring for my attention so they can sell me something (even if it's only more engagement).
I say just lets the bots babble among themselves, no need for humans to 'participate' in this internet-induced mental masturbation.
Busybox (Score:2)
Facebook is a busybox with ads. Saturday morning cartoons for adults. Shut-in-grandma might care about the baby pictures, but the site exists to be a soporific attached to a buy-now button.
Business Plan (Score:2)
1. Spend lots of money to create and host platform
2. Spend lots of money on AI to have fake users on the platform interact with other fake users
3. ???
4. Profit!
Downvotes (Score:2)
I miss downvotes. A quick click to help distinguish "I watched this and it sucked" vs "I watched this".
Bots (Score:5, Insightful)
We call them bots.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
President elect Elon calls them users.
Re: (Score:2)
Just another layer of his lies to everyone but especially advertisers
Re: Bots (Score:2)
You mean president evil. Actually saying "president [name]" will actually summon the devil and hasten the onset of the end times.
Re:Bots (Score:4, Insightful)
The other day I encountered someone who had set up what he called his "experiement in an AI-enhanced social media presence", where he had set up an AI bot to respond to people's posts en masse on topics of interest to him ("conversation starters"), and then he'd reply to any notifications he got back.
I had to very slowly and carefully explain to him that what he invented was called "spam".