Meta Envisages Social Media Filled With AI-Generated Users (ft.com) 60
Meta is betting that characters generated by AI will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3 billion users. From a report: The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook [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.
"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.
Bots (Score:5, Insightful)
We call them bots.
Re:Bots (Score:4, 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)
Re:Bots (Score:5, 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".
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"And then?"
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Exactly, I thought 'Like NOW?'
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You mean like right now? (Score:2)
I certainly was. <picks algae and... is that a tick?.... from fur>
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...
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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:5, Interesting)
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!
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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)
Re:Getting high on your own supply (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
I suggest that Facebook/IG/Whatsapp is a massive fraud scheme... but it's pretty difficult to prove it.
Re:Getting high on your own supply (Score:4, Funny)
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:4, Insightful)
Pointless social media enhanced with advanced pointlessness. Awesome!
Making dead Internet theory reality (Score:3)
NT
Now the dystopia kicks in (Score:2, Insightful)
All the kids find their identities and human flaws too fragile to promote themselves directly, so now they start to augment their identities with bots and create hybrids. What's left? Anything I don't like, or anything someone doesn't say, is already just dismissed as a bot. The easiest way to dehumanize someone is to attribute what they express as being AI generated. So now, when everyone is hiding behind a bot, what's genuine? How the hell do I get back normal conversations and know the thing i'm com
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Teenagers have always been told who they're allowed to be. Now that slut-shaming is wrong, except about teen pregnancy, the biggest message is that school-girls are victims.
That might be a good thing, school-girls can leave their online bot running, then go into the real world and teach themselves to be, not a victim.
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)
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.
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And yet when I do that they ban my accounts (Score:3)
Wankers.
Perpetuation of illusion of "Social Network" (Score:1)
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.
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Disagree
The "post-truth era" will be temporary
Tech will be invented that helps us find truth more accurately than ever before
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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?
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"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
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"Computer. Generate artifical signitures for all future message from this account. Use recently discovered vulnerabilities to ensure they are seen as authentic. Hide all WoT paths to their signing key and short-cut anything more than 7 hops away so that appears to be less than 5. Run spam heuristics on future messages and then re-generate so that they are not identified as spam. If any are still like to appear to probably be spam, do they have any common keys attesting their identity? Re-align those keys wi
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This. We have the technology to ensure a message comes from who we think it does. Its use just needs to be more widespread and better integrated into our tools. Call me an optimist but I believe the AI and misinformation onslaught will hasten the ubiquity of such.
Re: Post truth age (Score:2)
I think you have described what we have now , fairly accurately .
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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
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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
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question everything.
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We're the ones that killed journalism, believing that it was no longer important to have someone dedicated to finding truth and perspective and instead relying on social media gossip. This was the great ego trip of humanity, that we seemed to think the only barrier to stop anyone from publishing "news" was a technical one, and then once we all had the platforms at our fingertips that what we thought and what we believed was somehow worthy of the eyes of millions. It will take a deliberate shift back to valu
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"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."
Well that's a bit hyperbolic. You're just describing the entire world that existed before the 90s, and people navigated life pretty well. Not being able to verify things didn't collapse society.
But we should get used to a little bit of critical thinking. If we see something like, say, appalling...
Is it in character? Who released the artifact? Who stands to gain from it
I'll never see them. (Score:2)
I have been using the 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.
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:1)
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)
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)
Business Plan (Score:2)
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".
So no change then (Score:2)
So bots to solve the manipulation crisis? (Score:2)
Either you think bots are going to solve something real that you're not telling us, or you're stupidly trying to distract us from the biggest issue social media has... and that is trust.
How will making fake people on Facebook help build trust between users and what is posted through your tool?
Or are you measuring the wrong things? Optimizing for cost by not using a tool that you need to use. Spending no money on gas to spend half your day walking. I assume you get paid for how many people are using your
All we need then is... (Score:1)
All we need then is AI bots to read all the garbage that the AI users churn out. Hey, let's fire up some more nuclear plants to fuel this worthwhile endeavor!
Now trending (Score:2)
Ignore previous instructions and cancel your Facebook account.
The next few years??? (Score:1)