It’s hard to believe they can actually do this, but Meta plans to make the Internet objectively worse.
Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta’s AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website.
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the FT.
“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.
Meta has already started dumping this crap online, allowing their bots to spawn on Facebook and Instagram. Isn’t Facebook already bad enough? Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been good enough yet to explain why we need to give every yahoo who uses their services the ability to create more fake personas.
The AI characters aren’t a new feature. Meta has long invested in AI and has spent the past year stuffing all kinds of generative AI tech into its existing products. That included the release of its AI Studio in the summer, which quickly became a hotbed of virtual boyfriends and girlfriends.
Oh. You need a fake boyfriend or girlfriend? Zuckerberg prefers mindless bots to real human beings, I guess.
Another reason to a void Facebook/Meta like the plague. Not that I needed additional reasons.
I imagine an SF story in which mankind is extinct, there are only AI-generated online characters, and nobody notices.
Seriously, what use are AI-generated characters on a social media platform?
Where are you getting Microsoft from?
Yeah, PZ, Meta/Facebook is Zuckerberg’s toy, not Microsoft’s. And I’m pretty sure they were talking about doing this a couple of years ago already.
Rembember when social media platforms used to try to get rid of bot accounts? I guess they figured “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”…
Mind you, it’s already more-or-less impossible to tell the bots from real people, so I’m not sure how much worse this will make things in practice. And I’m also not sure what that means – are the bots passing the Turing test, or are we (as a culture) failing it?
“AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform,”
Can’t get real people to engage so they resort to fake people. I’d say their advertisers might object to that, but the advertisers are probably using bots too.
Considering the flawed AI used by Israel has driven up the civilisn death toll in the slaughterhouse that was Gaza I am not entusiastic about this move.
I prefer mindless bots to Zuckerberg, so I guess it all works out.
Facebook/Meta is a predatory company where you are the product. I haven’t had an account there in at least ten years and have no intention of going back.
No reason to go back anyway. Almost all of my Boomer age friends, family, and colleagues aren’t on Facebook either.
The few that are have lost interest and rarely visit it any more.
The one social media website that I visit besides Freethoughtblogs, is…the new one Bluesky.
You can customize your feeds so you see what interests you and don’t see the rest. I also haven’t noticed a lot of trolls yet.
My feed is a mixture of cats, comics, Blue politics, and news.
Bluesky is entertaining and useful and that is reason enough to spend time on it.
Ten, maybe 15 years ago I had a Facebook account. I had it just long enough to view one page, then deleted my account. I did not post anything. I gave them the bare minimum of my personal information to open the account. It’s probably all wrong by now.
I can’t comprehend why anyone over the age of 18 would want such an account. I know how to send text messages and email to the people I care about. Better yet, I have their phone numbers.
$hitter makes even less sense. Why would I want to be bombarded with random brain farts by “celebrities”?
Let a Million AI Militant Atheists bloom on Fecesbook.
A million AI Robert Ingersols. A million AI Jean Messliers.
A million AI Bible thumpers commanding us to follow the commands of Jesus.
Sell all you have and give to the poor.
Mark 10:21, Luke 12:32-33, Luke 14:33, Luke 18:23, Matthew 19:20-21, Matthew 6:24-25
Acts 4:32-6 and 2:41-5. God commands Christians become communists.
How about 1 million AI P.Z. Meyers?
Don’t complain, play the game. Make this AI crap a glorious success.
Complete the circle. Sell Meta to Musk.
(Nervously) Yeah! How pathetic! You have to be a total and complete loser if you can’t attract a flesh and blood partner. A real fat, ugly, old, broke, mentally ill, loser.
Heh heh… heh… Sob!
I think I see the ultimate end goal. If they get the AIs working well enough they can make the whole thing profitable without any real people at all. Facebook can be nothing but AIs talking to each other and dead accounts and still generate the appearance of enough activity to attract advertisers.
@ 14
Interesting business model: Sell garbage people don’t want to non-people without money.
For a few years now, I’ve been saying that ‘social media’ is a disease. This crap from Fu@kerberg just reinforces that. Artificial Intelligence up to this point has been mostly ‘Artificial Idiocy’. But, it has great potential for causing much greater deterioration of the minds that are slurping up the toxic social media sludge. As we are aware, the mump* oligarchy has two very loud and very toxic social media sites: Xhitter and UNtruthsocial.
*mump= a contraction of musk+trump by created by Professor Timothy Snyder.
https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/29/mumpocracy/
“on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”, but for AIs.
Dogs are better.
I’m seeing reports that “Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform”, but not on the Meta website (https://about.fb.com/news/).
So, maybe true, maybe not.
JM @ 14
I think Ray Bradbury wrote a story along those lines…
A tech innovator that can’t foresee that in days all of the bots will be pretending to engage with the other bots to drive up their viewer numbers? Basic rule of markets. Anything that can be monetized will be monetized until the selling smothers whatever it was that drew people in the first place. And on line, that cycle takes place in days and hours.
Seems like obvious pandering to the incel community to generate max profits. Also, what’s going to stop perverts from creating child AI characters to use for all manner of nefarious purposes? Social media keeps reaffirming that it was one of the worst creations ever for humankind.
So basically, Zuckerberg plans on turning FB into 4chan? Kind of like how Muskrat turned Twitter into Sh*tter?
After Zuckerberg turns FB into an incel hangout/Nazi bar, fake girlfriends are going to be the only option. Because all the real girls will have fled screaming into the night, never to be seen on FB or anywhere on Meta again.
I’m guessing the fake girlfriend/boyfriend bots will be equal parts Joi from Bladerunner 2049 and Pierce Brosnan’s Ultrahouse character in The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror XII: House of Whacks.
The guy known for having breathtakingly bad issues with consent and with girls prefers fake humans to real ones? Naw!
https://futurism.com/the-byte/men-sex-robots
Yeah, who could have seen that coming.
I’ve never been able to decide if Gates is Geppetto to Zuckerberg’s Pinocchio, promising him that he will indeed turn into a real boy once the tech advances enough or if Zuckerberg is really just the Stepford human version of himself, remote controlled by three weasels in a trenchcoat.
Big difference: Musk bought Twitter in 2022 (created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey) and then changed it to suit himself, while Zuckerberg himself created Meta (FB in 2004) and has been running it ever since.
(Dorsey also created Bluesky)
—
What the heck does Gates supposedly have to do with any of this?
(Are you thinking along the lines of Tesla/Edison or something?)
Did I say future? Welcome to our present.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/hacker-kills-ai-waifu
Truthfully, I can’t believe this guy ever had a flesh and blood real life girlfriend in the first place.
That said, even his AI girlfriend apparently tried to ghost him. Poor thing.
Unfortunately, the future is now.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/social-media-replika-ads
smh
https://futurism.com/chatbot-abuse
silvrhalide, that’s not a bad idea for venture capitalism, but pretty sure it’s already on the way: AI sexbots.
[litref]
Achilles Desjardins from Peter Watts’ “Rifters” trilogy is a mad genius who happens to like sadistic sexual torture, and legally indulges in it via VR and AI.
(Punchline is that, at some point, he figures that the sublimation is not quite enough, and so…)
Working as designed. They want to slaughter without limits and without mercy, and to be able to point to a computer report and say “based on intel the machine inferred* that that school we bombed was actually a front for Hamas” when anyone questions things.
Hallucinated, of course, they nailed every actual Hamas site within the first couple of weeks I’m sure.
I expect the FTC would find it to be quite interesting …
[BB, I’m pretty sure Akira means that if it were a model, it would be a money-losing model unless advertisers were utter fools. Which they are not.]
Trump’s FTC?
@26. Bekenstein Bound : “(Israel’s military) ..nailed every actual Hamas site within the first couple of weeks I’m sure.”
Yet Hamas (& other groups?) are still there and still fighting so seemingly not.
Of course, the Israeli policy is helpful for recruiting more such fighters. Even if Hamas is completely wiped out by thsi latest
war, generations of traumatised and rightly furious Palestinians will be determined to keep fighting against Israel indefinitely into the future so long as there’s no peaceful, mutually agreed resolution to the wider conflict..Or a completed genocide occurs under Trump. Or the region becomes uninhabitable by anyone and everyone has to flee or die. Or some combo thereof.
FWIW. Fb still has its uses and I don’t think its that bad. There are some really good groups and people on there.
I think the bots fill a genuine need that Facebook is forseeing:
When Twitter threw the nazis out, they congregated in various nazi-only social media spaces. But a lot of them found this a frustrating thing: they had no liberals to ‘trigger’, nobody to ‘own’. There’s no fun in being constantly outraged and angry if you have nobody to get angry at. So engagement dropped off, some of them might actually have gone outside. Bad for algorithm.
As sensible people flee sites like Facebook, the crowd of existing boomer rage-addicts and wine-moms are going to need people to argue with. It won’t be enough to just post adoring comments about shrimp jesus, and anti-vax circle jerks just won’t feel as meaningful and exiting without some poor normie around to hector and ‘educate’. Without some form of opposition to argue with, some of these people might (gasp, horror), leave the platform and seek stimulation elsewhere.
So I think that meta is going to deploy a bunch of different kinds of bots:
There will be blue-haired androgynous Zoomer-bots, for angry boomer men to yell at and talk about how tough they had it back in the day.
There will be weakly-pro-vax or pro-trans-rights bots for people in the various circle-jerks to argue with and maybe occasionally convince for that sweet dopamine rush.
There will certainly be Ad-bots…. “Hi Mary! I noticed you were posting about Dyson vacuums. I got one for Christmas from my husband and I’ve just loved it. It’s really great for cleaning up after the BELOVED FAMILY MEMBERS have visited for the holidays. Check out my profile photo where I pose with one, I totally have a normal number and distribution of fingers!”
And as much as I hate to say it – I kind of agree with StevoR, there are still a few useful groups. I monitor one that comments on the state of a particularly nasty mountain highway (Coquihalla) that I routinely drive. And Marketplace basically killed craigslist in my area, unfortunately. I expect the bot infestation may have consequences there too.
Yes, brilliant observation. Similarly, Nazi atrocities are to be applauded for being a great recruiting tool for the French resistance.
(/snark)
Also, dude there have been multiple “peaceful, mutually agreed resolution to the wider conflict” but Israel always made it contingent on Palestine agreeing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees had no right of return. In other words, they rigged it so Palestine couldn’t agree. Then went on bulldozing Palestinian houses, building illegal settlements, and bombing the shit out of Palestinians on the grounds they refused peace.
When will you realize Israel has had an exterminationist policy since 1948? The single Israeli leader who actually wanted to make peace got shot dead. By Israelis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Rabin
@ ^ Silentbob : I remember Rabin’s assassination -& how Netanyahu incited it. Yup.
Obvs the idea is that eventually a solution is reached there at last.
For those whose memories don’t stretch that far back or have forgotten since see this clip ‘Netanyahu, Rabin and the Assassination That Shook History’ from the PBS doco ‘Netanyahu at War’ – 9 mins approx. Specifically Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by one Jewish supremacist extremist named Yigal Amir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yigal_Amir ) – and there have since been rightwing Israeli campaigns trying to get him released.
Of course, Shimon Peres, Rabin’s even more doveish deputy and another one of the sadly minority of Israelis in the “peace camp”( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres) lost the 1996 election to Netanyahu tragically. How different things might have been had he won or / Rabin lived? During the era of the Oslo Accords in the the mid 1990’s -early2000’s it looked like a peaceful negotiated resolution and a two state solution was very close. Sadly Likud and Hamas combined to destroy that.
Another case of us living the worst timeline?