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.
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.
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
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
They’re doing it to sell to companies to sell positive opinions and politics from “real” people.
Idk, but I don’t really see that Instagram is dying.
Twitter. Reddit.
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.
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.
You’ve heard of the Dead Internet Theory, now get ready for the UNDEAD Internet Theory!
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.
Dead internet theory is becoming true.
Bots talking to bots will be 90% of the internet.
A new odd language will develop that us meatbags won’t understand.
On god no cap frfr
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those apps are legitimately dead. They just haven’t caught up yet.
deleted by creator
It feels like Zuckerberg is out of ideas and just chases the trends to stay relevant. He was all in on the “metaverse” until he wasn’t because the concept disappeared. Now, he’s all in on AI because everyone else is. Even the quest, before it became the face of the metaverse, was him chasing another big idea from someone else.
He and the company haven’t had original ideas in a very long time. Even the smaller ones, like Stories and Reels, are just ideas copied from someone else.
The Facebook wasn’t even his idea. The Winklevoss Bros came up with it and he was the programmer they got to code it, and subsequently stole it from them.
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.
Finally someone said it
Knowing my luck this would be the only way to make the metaverse suddenly take off and rake in billions.
Thank fuck I deleted my Facebook when I did (around the time of the Cambrige Analytica scandal). Never had an Instagram.
For anyone reading, delete them all. Load of shite, you won’t miss them.
This type of stuff will get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
The idea of random AI floating about to soothe people and give them attention is damn creepy. Ew.
have you seen the 2013 movie Her?
This is great. If it keeps up my remaining family on FB will give up and I can finally delete my stagnant account.
