Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/meta-wants-more-ai-bots-on-facebook-and-instagram.html

by thm • 2 years ago

223 393 2 years ago

I wonder how these bots will impact their metrics reported to investors. Will they be filtered out or into a different bucket, or just included into the mau and similar.

itake3• 2 years ago

I don’t understand. Presumably, this will create more engagement for the human users, because there is more content for the humans to interact with.

Why would they count an ai model as a monthly active user?

dartos5• 2 years ago

Why would they count an ai model as a monthly active user?

To inflate their numbers and justify higher stock prices.

So money, of course.

ozim3• 2 years ago

Then next step is to not show anything human created to other humans - because human created content needs moderation, people swear at each other.

Imagine how pleasant and disinfected content will be there, every company will be happy to pay for ads because there will be no offensive comments and no images of your aunt. All the content perfectly aligned with what people want to see and there somewhere in between ads.

Kids in 10 years or 15 won’t even know that in past people actually could post something on the internet- they will think it was all like TV for us that only rich and handsome people get to post on the internet.

Who wouldn’t buy all those things that happen to be presented by perfect people in perfect world that you don’t have real access to but you can read on internet or have a part of that world by buying some crap they advertise.

It already happens but FB/Meta doesn’t have control over influencers - they can create their own now and deplatform all real ones because they won’t need them. Companies love that as it won’t turn out some influencer that they bought ads with died overdosing drugs somewhere on the street.

jamra• 2 years ago

The real fear I have is in plausible deniability for filtering and muting discussion, which they do now. Moving it to a NN can always hand wave away the responsibility.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Will they show ads to the bots?

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

I mean Facebook massively inflates impressions anyways and has been doing for a while.

orionblastar• 2 years ago

AI Bots will post advertising and astroturf their company products and services.

friend_Fernando4• 2 years ago

I think we actually need more bots discussing politics online. Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony chambers.

The only way to salvage democracy is to bring it back offline. Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions. It's time for the good guys to get their hands dirty and break the spell. Trolls cannot be silenced, but they can be offset.

Animats3• 2 years ago

Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony chambers.

That's the objective of modern Russian propaganda. The goal is not to be believed. It is to create confusion and reap inaction.

friend_Fernando4• 2 years ago

Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their interest. The net, filtered result is what's in their interest.

That leaves "mutual assured dialogue destruction" as the only option, IMO.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

That's the objective of propaganda within russia. For external audiences the objective is to sow chaos.

herbst5• 2 years ago

Isn't that the same for any bigger propaganda machine? I don't see the US doing any different than that

panta• 2 years ago

I have been thinking about these lines for a long time. Humanity would be much better if we went back to pre-social network internet, populated by small human-moderated and vertical forums. We can and should destroy social networks, using their own tactics.

concordDance• 2 years ago

Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions.

No, online it was undermined by selection effects. Where those who care the most about something are most likely to engage or post, leading to endless streams of unrepresentative and extreme views.

jokethrowaway• 2 years ago

It was shaped by censorship! Conservatives and libertarians have been banned for a decade.

Since the first Obama social media campaign the internet became very one sided - and people started believing that crap so much, everyone here had to sit through at least one DEI training.

I'm against any form of government and centralization of power (which nearly always happens thanks to regulations and laws); I'm not a fan of Musk and conservatives (I'll change my mind after I see with my eyes a significant reduction of the US government) but I'm glad to see a return to balance in online discourse.

We had another DEI training at work and I was impressed to read everyone left negative reviews about it. Quite the change in sentiment!

nextworddev2• 2 years ago

You are describing Reddit

finnthehuman• 2 years ago

Online, it was undermined by troll farms

Meh, the conversation had already been undermined by that point. People discussing politics already ceded the conversation to people who liked fiery arguments. The posting farms were just convenient scapegoats for flameposters to explain why they weren't winning, and try to salvage some reputability.

hmmm-i-wonder3• 2 years ago

Considering the state of offline media today, I doubt there is any going back to the real or imagined pre-internet days of media.

alex11386• 2 years ago

Hey here's a novel idea

Have social media websites be reverse chronological posts by friends/pages you follow instead of what AI thinks you're interested in (and yet somehow not explicitly following, yet you get it in your feed anyway)

Groxx• 2 years ago

it'll never work. what's next? federation? insanity. impossibility.

darth_avocado• 2 years ago

But think about the poor shareholders

wincy2• 2 years ago

I’ve developed this tic where anytime I’m on Facebook I aggressively block all the non sponsored suggested content in my timeline. I’ve blocked literally thousands of pages at this point. So the recommendations have gotten really weird, last week it thought maybe I was gay, then I started recommending Chinese state sponsored pages, now it’s recommending all 50 National Geographic pages. It’s always pages over a million “likes” whatever that means. I'm curious what’ll happen if I manage to block all of them.

Honestly probably something lame where the recommendations just get weirder and weirder (which I guess is happening now)

koutetsu• 2 years ago

What a coincidence! I have done the exact same thing but on Instagram instead of Facebook and have had similar results to yours. Since both belong to Meta, we can safely assume that they use the same or very similar backends to serve ads.

I think it would be interesting to do a large scale experiment to see what can happen.

Symbiote3• 2 years ago

Do you get fewer junk posts in the feed, or are they just different?

parpfish3• 2 years ago

i have a burner fb account that i use to follow a local lost-pets group and check hours for restaurants that refuse to have normal webpages.

this account has no friends and just the one group membership so my feed if 100% platform-promoted swill. and it is bad. the current fad is for there to be accounts that repost screenshots of successfull AITA reddit posts to engagement farm.

the sad part is that it works. they get a ton of comments and likes

hapticmonkey• 2 years ago

You can access those simpler chronological feeds in Facebook under More > Feeds. They still insert sponsored posts in that feed, but you can block them with browser extensions.

The annoying part is that if you load the feed url from a bookmark, at least on mobile, it reloads to the home page anyway. So you need to navigate to it manually each time. Never used to be this way. I guess they’ll remove the “feeds” feature soon enough anyway.

Symbiote3• 2 years ago

That's wonderful! Thanks!

On mobile the URL is just facebook.com so there's nothing to bookmark for me. It's still useful though.

vasco• 2 years ago

They want more engagement.

It's like if you build a typewriter and give it to a few humans, they'll write on it a few times a week maybe, not that much. Sometimes a supermarket list or a letter to a friend. This is what I'd call "quality engagement". There's a person doing a valuable activity for themselves, where time using the thing isn't relevant.

Then you give the same typewriter to a monkey and every time the monkey finishes a page he gets a banana. He'll stay there all day every day. Lots of engagement and just gibberish on every page.

Advertisers are buying monkey engagement.

And platforms don't care so right now all the typewriters are made for a monkey hand to type all day every day, and you can no longer write your normal letters without feeling annoyed at why it got better for the monkey instead of leaving it alone for you.

alex11386• 2 years ago

Yeah, but replace "they" with "Zuckerberg" and "platforms" with "Facebook"

_Algernon_3• 2 years ago

But how will that create value for shareholders?

InsideOutSanta• 2 years ago

The numbers are going up!

What numbers?

THE NUMBERS!

nradov6• 2 years ago

Most users don't want reverse chronological feeds. They say they do but they really don't, and fail to appreciate how that would actually work. First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed. Second, if you don't log on for a while you're likely to miss some major life events (birth, death, marriage, divorce, move, new job) that people most want to see.

mrweasel3• 2 years ago

They say they do but they really don't,

Probably depends on your usage pattern. I think most would prefer it, but "engagement" measurements will make it seem like they hate it, because they spend less time on the page. If companies like Facebook actually wanted to know, they'd make the setting "sticky" rather than constantly reset to algorithmic, then measure over 3 - 12 months how many switches to either one and stays there. The fact that you can set your feed to permanently be chronological tells me that Facebook REALLY doesn't want you do use this feature.

"Power users" may prefer the algorithm, due to the volume of posts they'd see, while many casual users prefer reverse chronological and then just check in every other week. Seriously the last year I was on Facebook, that was my usage. Block everything not posted directly by a "friend", sort by date, read the five posts from the past two week and logoff. Took me just a few minutes a week to catch up. I just don't think that usage aligns with Facebooks business model.

65• 2 years ago

The real solution is to make the content sortable like Reddit.

hmmm-i-wonder3• 2 years ago

First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed

For 'social influencers' sure, but normal users don't care about that. Removing the engagement hacked platform that primarily benefits social influencers would be a significant improvement for most users on most social media platforms.

toddmorey• 2 years ago

This is what makes bluesky so refreshing

__loam• 2 years ago

It's so nice over there.

fullshark4• 2 years ago

Sounds like a good way to lose 50% of your revenue

BeFlatXIII2• 2 years ago

Reverse chronological means the feeds get flooded by high-velocity posters and low-volume posters are buried.

RobKohr• 2 years ago

Well, you make it only the posters you follow, and then go through your posters and only show the most recent unread one from each of them before cycling back around.

fzzzy• 2 years ago

This is solveable. For every high frequency poster, show them in the feed at the time of their oldest of a batch of posts in duration X. Reveal all these posts with ui at that point in the timeline. Tune duration X.

r00fus• 2 years ago

Just move to Bluesky or Mastodon.

alex11386• 2 years ago

Facebook works because of network effects of people you know in real life

For the vast majority of people, leaving is not an option, and no, the "you always have a choice" line is simply not correct

Animats3• 2 years ago

There are probably AI Instagrammers already. Their lives are better than yours. There are already AI crypto influencers.

simonw2• 2 years ago

I think this whole thing can mostly be explained by the job titles. What do you expect the "Vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta" to be pushing for?

This is happening across hundreds (thousands?) of companies right now. They've decided they need a generative AI strategy, there's very little existing precedent for what works and what doesn't so they're hurling things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

simonw2• 2 years ago

Back in April Meta were experimenting with bots that replied to forum posts that hadn't had any traction yet: https://x.com/korolova/status/1780450925028548821

Their "Meta AI" bot replied to a parent asking for advice on school programs and said:

I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program. We've had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.

throwup238• 2 years ago

That sounds like it’s talking about the Meta executive in charge of privacy and consumer protection. The AI has developed a parasocial parental relationship with its own executives.

grecy• 2 years ago

For years social media sites have been able to hide behind the Chapter 120 defence, because they didn’t generate the content, so they’re not liable for it.

I wonder if their AI boys will open them up to lawsuits. If their not recommends a product or location that turns out to be dangerous, or medical advice that is harmful etc.

nradov6• 2 years ago

I have no idea what the "Chapter 120 defense" is, but online liability concerns were always mostly about libel. That's what led to the CDA Section 230.

https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

Giving harmful advice generally doesn't create any legal liability so no defense is needed there. It might be bad for PR though.

corobo• 2 years ago

Man that's gonna be some prime real estate for adverts

red_admiral• 2 years ago

There's so much low quality human or non-AI bot content on FB already, plus every other timeline ad I see is a scam of some kind.

XKCD 810 comes to mind.

(I only use the site to stay in touch with some family of my parents' generation. Messenger/Whatsapp are still tools I use regularly.)

openrisk2• 2 years ago

We need a tech hype that is not terminally tainted as an anti-human abomination. Is it too much to ask for? Surely those gazillions of GPUs can be deployed to do something actually useful? Are we beyond redemption?

InkCanon7• 2 years ago

If anything causes the AI bubble to burst, it's that 99% of finding is going to companies that don't solve any real problems. It's shocking that the only major player in real world problem solving is DeepMind.

baggachipz2• 2 years ago

I'm going to say "when" and not "if" here, because of your assertion above. VC's spending multiple fortunes on shoehorning in shit that nobody wants or needs.

tokioyoyo4• 2 years ago

What you consider “useful” is not useful for others, and vice versa. For some 19 year olds, curating their IG feeds and making the smoothest transition on TikTok to go viral is actually important.

It sounds stupid, but we went through this entire debate back in early 2010s. FB/IG/TT/YT obviously won, and seems like that’s what majority of people prefer doing.

openrisk2• 2 years ago

This relativism applies to some extent to pure entertainment activities. What is worthwhile, trendy, in-group (or whatever) does vary enormously by region, age group etc.

But these platforms are now for most people "all-there-is". They have replaced effectively any other source of information. What can go wrong when algorithmically titillated echo chambers shape people's mental horizons and behavior? We are increasingly finding out.

k1kingy• 2 years ago

My FB timeline is already a complete mess with most irrelevant garbage as it stands. Not exactly sure what adding additional 'noise' is going to achieve outside of boosting numbers (which I guess is what they want).

A current snapshot my feed:

  - Group post (from one I follow)  
  - Ad  
  - Post (from company I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from one I follow)  
  - Ad  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Post (from person I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Post (from person I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from one I follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from one I follow)

I gave up writing the above, but it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know.

0xEF4• 2 years ago

Why are you still using it?

I dropped FB about 12 years ago, have not looked back since. I ask people this question who still use FB and complain about terrible it is. They answer with some generic "to stay in touch with such and such" which is easier and less invasive to do with SMS or email.

So, why are you still using it?

prinny_2• 2 years ago

The answer is network effect and friction . It is hard to communicate to everyone on your friends list that moving forward they can reach you via email or text only. It’s going to work with close friends and family but other people that want to reach out will not be able to find you. And there are always cases when you want to connect (or be easy to find) with someone who is not a close acquaintance.

Symbiote3• 2 years ago

I use it for events.

It aggregates most of the small and large music and other events in the city into a single place, and shows me when a friend is "interested" or "going" to the event.

I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook. But there are many events only advertised on Facebook! For others, I'd need to check 20+ websites every week to keep up. RSS is no longer implemented on these sites, neither are aggregators like last.fm keeping up to date. (That's probably what I used before Facebook.)

My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage).

Two months ago I started a subscription to see if that would reduce the amount of junk, hopefully to zero, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. It has probably hidden ads, but I had an adblocker anyway.

For a long time I've objected under GDPR to the tracking, which I think is why I get the mixture of political junk.

spacechild1• 2 years ago

In my case:

1. stay in touch with all sorts people around the world (who are not family, close friends or colleagues). Basically like an extended address book.

2. advertize events to many people in a certain area. Conversely, I regularly find out about events on FB.

The FB timeline has become a complete shitshow and I stopped engaging. I really wish there were good replacements for my last remaining use cases...

nothercastle5• 2 years ago

Marketplace… somehow they took over the marketplace for used stuff and killed cl. OfferUp was always crap so it doesn’t count.

bluGill11• 2 years ago

SMS and (to a lesser extend) email are not ways to communicate with distance friends. Someone I went to school with 30 years ago and haven't seen since isn't going to call me about their new grandkid, Facebook works well to share these types of pictures. SMS and email take too much effort, Facebook is much lower friction to share that and thus I find out, while if they uses SMS or email I wouldn't be on the list as they would give up before they got to my name in their contacts.

Kiro5• 2 years ago

How is SMS easier? I can't easily access it on the desktop or the browser. Group SMS chats seem to be non-standard if possible (never seen anyone use it). Sharing things such as photos and videos through SMS is still a broken mess.

freehorse8• 2 years ago

Events and groups/communities (eg hobby, housing etc related). Otherwise I do not "follow" any of my actual (or not) friends.

TheSkyHasEyes• 2 years ago

Friends and relations afar.

manfre• 2 years ago

Any time I see a post with the "Follow" link, I click the X or triple dot to hide or signify disinterest. They appear as a flood, but the system gives up and I get a several week reprieve from unwanted suggestions.

iib• 2 years ago

I don't want to make you use it more, but I found a thing that actually works for me, to restore some of the previous feed behavior. I saved a bookmark that directly goes to the "Friends" feed. It seems to have surprisingly few (I think zero or one) ads and recommended things this way. The funny thing is that the "You read all the posts" thing still appears if used in this way, telling you to go outside.

I do the same for instagram [2], and there was also a post of setting "Google web" as the default search engine, showing you actual web results, not stuff recommended by Google.

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr [1]

https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following [2]

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

This is it. My feed is fine too. If you don't tell FB what you do and don't want to see, it's just going to spray random shit at you.

freehorse8• 2 years ago

Thanks! The "friends" filter with facebook does not really work from me (I have unfollowed all my fb friends and follow only pages/groups mostly for events and such) but realised that replacing "friends" with "following" in the url actually provides a feed with anything I am following, so really thanks!

I used to use the FBP extension but it still takes so long to load and filter out stuff that facebook floods my feed, so this is much better.

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=following&sk=h_chr

gibspaulding• 2 years ago

Interestingly for me on iOS, that instagram link just takes me to the main feed in the app. For anyone else getting this, you have to tap the instagram logo on the top left, then select “following” from there.

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

The second param on the FB url seems to control the sidebar. Better without the &sk=...

nox1012• 2 years ago

My feed in the mobile app is

    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - people you might know
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from frien
    - loops
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from a non-friend about a friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend

I can only guess the reason mine isn't filled with spam is because I click the ... and pick "don't show me this" whenever it shows me something I don't care about.

I wish I could tell it never show me loops, never recommend friends, never show me posts of friends of friends. While annoying, it's not so bad ATM that I've felt the need to quit

On the other hand I check it less than once a week, maybe once every 2 weeks.

kraftman• 2 years ago

That many posts from friends would represent months worth of my friends posts. For most people facebook doesnt show friends posts because no one posts anymore.

RajT883• 2 years ago

"don't show me this"

I have tried this with bizarre results.

Any kind of booby hot chick type post, I will do this. Sometimes I go so far as blocking the account. There was a week it was all AI-generated booby photos of Salma Hayek - no matter how many accounts I un-followed or blocked, there was a never-ending stream of accounts with AI generated Salma Hayek photos being posted. I gave up after a week, and took some time of Facebook.

A month later, I returned, and the Salma Hayek stuff is all gone. Periodically it goes back into some sort of booby photo trend, and I can't get it to stop, so I just quit browsing facebook for a while and when I return it's done. On the time order of a couple weeks, unfollowing and/or blocking makes no difference.

I should mention - I am part of a couple groups for car stuff, and a couple groups for fishing stuff. It's not like the content I am interacting with is particularly boob-rich.

As far as friends, I only see stuff from friends who post a lot. That's the trend. They aren't people I comment on their posts, or even really talk to in real life anymore.

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

how have you managed this? mine is full of thirdparty shit even though I have been actively saying "I don't like this"

matsemann• 2 years ago

I can't recall the last time I saw a post by a friend. No one posts there anymore, except if they get married or a kid. I think you may be in a particularly active bubble, while the rest of us just get fake engagement thrown in our faces.

the__alchemist• 2 years ago

Read this post to yourself aloud.

Why are you still checking Facebook? Keep the messenger app on your phone if people you know still use it.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Not OP, but my global friend network still has folks who post life updates on Facebook, making it a requirement.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

I want an app that uses the accessibility API to plug into Meta, Snap, etc and gives you full control over your socials ala Recall using LLMs. I feel like Gen AI is the countermeasure to closed social ecosystems trying to treat you as the product. Ingest everything my social users have access to, and let me control the experience (Recall meets Buffer?).

Scraping is old and busted, consuming the firehose available to you and controlling consumption of it on your own terms is the new hotness.

https://www.recall.ai/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall

Finnucane• 2 years ago

It's really become unusable. Most of my friends have stopped posting. There's very little incentive to log in now.

jameshart2• 2 years ago

The original value proposition of Facebook - keep people you don’t see in person very often up to date on what’s happening in your life, and keep up with what’s going on with them - still feels like something people actually want, but it’s been clear for a long time that no service that tries to offer that can sustain it.

Facebook got too excited with its ability to leverage the ‘friend graph’ and broke the very reason people wanted to ‘friend’ people on FB in the first place.

Feels like people have generally decided that WhatsApp group chats are the preferred model for keeping in touch.

elboru• 2 years ago

Wow, the amount of ads I get is insane. For every three posts, one is an ad:

  - Post (from a friend)
  - Ad
  - Post (from a random page I don't follow)
  - People you may know (I don't know any of those people)
  - Ad
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)
  - Post (from a random page I don't follow)
  - Ad
  - Post (from a friend)
  - Post (from a page I follow)
  - Ad

BeFlatXIII2• 2 years ago

it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know.

At least for me, it's because the people I care about have long ago stopped posting, and those who are useful to keep as friends post garbage, so they've long ago been muted.

I wish there were more posts from groups I follow instead of nonsense from groups they recommend.

lkramer• 2 years ago

It has become taboo to say we don't have any more content for you.

I was searching for tech jobs in Copenhagen in my fairly (but not overly) specialised field that is not overly common here on LinkedIn.

After 4-5 results that was relevant to what I was looking for it had obviously exhausted the available options, however rather than admit defeat it started showing me truly bizarre results, including unskilled student jobs in supermarkets and jobs as cleaners.

asdff2• 2 years ago

No one makes posts like they did in 2011. Fb has to do this or the site looks dead.

nextworddev2• 2 years ago

I guess they decided this counts towards DAUs…

axegon_• 2 years ago

Most likely an effort to boost the DAU numbers. I quit facebook over a decade ago because I truly felt that it was pointless. At the time I was convincing myself that it's a way to stay in touch with a certain number of people I would otherwise have no way of contacting. Then a friend said something that changed my mind: "If someone is not actively a part of your life, chances are there's a good reason they are not". And he was right: I deleted it, knowing full well that I'd have no other way to connect to hundreds of people. Over a decade later I haven't had the reason to try and contact either one of them. At this point, I don't even know what facebook looks like but all this AI-generated crap is just as pointless as the ads that would get shoved down my throat if I didn't have a very aggressive ad blocker. As much as I was strongly against ad blockers 10 years ago, since many sites and blogs used only that to get some reward for their effort, we are at a point where the internet is unusable without an ad blocker. All major platforms are flooded by AI-generated crap. And I mean Facebook, Medium, StackExchange, hell, I'm willing to bet a good chunk of papers coming out these days are mostly ai-generated. And don't even get me started on musk's shithole that is Twitter. No, I am not saying that AI is not useful or helpful - it is, but it should be a supplement, not the primary ingredient, let alone the sole ingredient.

The true value of the internet used to be the collective knowledge, and not mass-produced regurgitated set of tokens and pixel values. Personally I've gone to the even pre-rss days and have a list of personal blogs I scroll through for things I find interesting and avoid large platforms altogether. Interestingly enough, I've been finding more and more motivation to start writing myself though I rarely get the chance to push it through the end and in most cases I get stuck at 95% for many months until I get to find the time to do the remaining 5% of the work. That's how many I have lined up so far:

git status . | wc -l 59

disqard2• 2 years ago

Not sure if it'll help you, but do read this:

https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

Perhaps all you need is a perspective shift. Wishing you luck with your personal writing journey!

BLKNSLVR• 2 years ago

Create additional engagement ... with nonexistent entities.

So Facebook maintains it's commitment to promoting the opposite of a healthy society.

I actually can't decide if non-human interactions on Facebook are a better or worse option than the current echo chambers.

seydor2• 2 years ago

Socialization is about conspecifics. AI may augment the process for humans, but you can't expect people at large to engage with nonhumans. I mean, people do talk to their pets, but they don't consider that socializing.

bluGill11• 2 years ago

If you just need someone to talk to AI might be good. There are a lot of lonely people out there that need someone to talk to and don't know how to do it. (particularly people in nursing homes who thus cannot get out and meet real people)

However I want Facebook as a way to remain connected to be distant friends not talk with people. I want to see my friends kids, their cats, whatever else they do that they are proud of. I know them personally even if I only see them at a class reunion every 10 years or something. I don't want to see cute cats (unless it is your cat), I don't want to see "joke of the day" - if I want that I'll find one of the many joke of the day places that cater to my sense of humor. I get plenty of politics elsewhere (unless they are running for office or assisting a campaign - share is not assisting a campaign). If I care about professional sports I can see it myself - let me know how your (or your kid's) games go since I won't find out about that.

I wish there was a way to make Facebook that latter - it sortof fills that role. However Facebook hates it because I catch up after 5-10 minutes of scrolling every day (usually the lower end of that list, but with the holidays the latter these last few weeks) and then close.

PittleyDunkin2• 2 years ago

you just need someone to talk to AI might be good. There are a lot of lonely people out there that need someone to talk to and don't know how to do it.

Facebook is about the last company on earth I'd trust to identify, let alone be responsible for facilitating, social behavior.

mrweasel3• 2 years ago

but they don't consider that socializing.

Which is exactly why this will make Facebooks problem even worse. Honestly I don't think Facebook understand what their main issue is, it's lack of real human interaction. The stupid part is that they killed their main product themselves, in order to push ever more ads.

LinkedIn is becoming a shit show as more and more people are posting stuff that previously belonged on Facebook, though they are tacking on some work related angle, you know to keep it professional. It is my opinion that the reason why LinkedIn is seeing more and more of these Facebook posts is because it is the last place online where you'll get real human interaction and socializing (however f-ed up it might be).

weitendorf• 2 years ago

You can certainly get real engagement on other platforms still. I think the reason there is so much weird cringe on LinkedIn is that:

1. It actually does get a lot of engagement and watch time, maybe not even despite how bad it is, but because it’s so bad that people can’t look away. If it’s cringy enough it’s no longer boring. It used to be that people ignored the feed entirely because it was all just boring stuff.

2. Building a personal brand is a really big thing these days and is legitimately valuable. Being able to write something and hit post and get real engagement for $0 (vs what it’d cost to get that engagement by paying for it directly) is nuts. IMO this isn’t obvious if you’re working as an engineer but if your job requires any sales or marketing it’s genuinely helpful.

3. LinkedIn is actually a really good place to farm engagement because of its general user base (professionals from early career to prime earning years), professional bent (intent), and availability of real names/titles/location.

I find it kind of fascinating how these engagement mechanisms work in spite of it all because they all rely on some kind of “hack” on human attention.

nerdponx2• 2 years ago

you can't expect people at large to engage with nonhumans

NPCs are a big component of a lot of video games. Imagine an Elder Scrolls game with no NPCs.

A social media platform filled with AI agents pretending to be your friends is basically just a "social media simulator" video game, with all the same requirements for immersion that make it enjoyable/entertaining to use.

The fact that it's "multiplayer" (other real humans engaging with the mix of humans and AIs) doesn't change that.

Facebook has become a ghost town, so they want to turn Facebook into a Facebook simulator.

Imagine if a dying MMORPG could populate its game with NPCs that would help retain the dwindling player base, to avoid a collapsed network effect. Sounds good, right? Same thing here.

(Facebook became a ghost town in large part due to Facebook's own enshittification campaign, but that's another story)

tokioyoyo4• 2 years ago

A few months ago, the same argument popped up about AI videos. But the long game strategy is making it “normal” for the kids and youth growing up, so they would consider it as socializing. It’ll be up to the adults to fight against it.

If we grew up with AI YouTube, we wouldn’t bat an eye on more AI videos, or socialization and etc., as we would consider that as just… business as usual.

seydor2• 2 years ago

Not sure. Which Cgi videos make it to the top? Not even movies

paxys• 2 years ago

Social media stopped being about socialization a long time ago. It's now purely content consumption.

maxehmookau• 2 years ago

I quit FB 3 years ago. It's already riddled with bots, AI generated "content" and ragebait.

If this doesn't push you away from it, what will?

bluGill11• 2 years ago

I've been trying to block all that with some success. Not much - there are more meme groups for every niche subject than you would think and someone into that niche feels like they need to share them all.

herbst5• 2 years ago

What even make you stay so long? It's been an targetted ad platform full of scammy ads for much longer than that

muglug• 2 years ago

Instagram just asked if I wanted to chat with a Hawk Tuah AI bot.

To me that’s the clearest possible evidence that the product people over there have basically given up.

It reminds me of when Facebook went all-in on Live Video in 2016 — a product direction that pretty obviously came from the top.

InkCanon7• 2 years ago

It's a clear sign Meta leadership has clearly lost the plot, giving in to hype instead of any vision.

iLoveOncall• 2 years ago

Was that not obvious enough when they renamed to Meta?

It seems everyone has forgotten the absolute failure that this shift has been.

dagmx2• 2 years ago

Meta leadership have rarely had a vision beyond “how do we capture the success others are having in this space”. I suppose that’s a vision in and of itself but not a very inspired one.

This is the case for most of their successful products:

- Facebook itself started this way for Zuck

- Instagram and WhatsApp were purchases to corner that market against incumbents, as is Thread

- Oculus was a purchase to try and get their own app ecosystem after their phone project failed.

They have brilliant engineers and put out interesting stuff, but I don’t think there’s a top down vision.

Take oculus, their vision has been scattershot and even Boz says they basically make tons of different product directions and then decide what goes to market. Which sure, can work, but that also implies they don’t have a North Star to shoot for. Quest Pro was a failure and they released three types of Oculus lines close to each other (Rift, Go, Quest) before realizing the Quest was the real success path.

Similarly with AI, their approach has been to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Like their celebrity AI chatbots ( https://youtu.be/sfdzkHawZLo?si=oCKAbFHjiOlFRKKh ) or sticking GenAI in every product without a specific user story.

Again, great engineering work in all of their pursuits. But if you analyze any given product venture, it’s always throwing ideas at the wall and hoping one catches.

lenerdenator• 2 years ago

The vision is simple: drive engagement to get you to give up more information about yourself to sell to advertisers and get your eyeballs on their app to see ads made by said advertisers.

If they can get you to do that to an AI, well, why not?

... besides the obvious risks to society and mental health, which Zucc has never cared about before.

dml2135• 2 years ago

The bear is sticky with honey

paganel3• 2 years ago

Facebook the app/website is already dead, as only boomers and people like me (not yet boomers but not young, either) are now its only remaining users, while IG is going into the same realm of irrelevance, mostly because millennials (its main audience) have spiritually become boomers-like themselves.

As such, Meta is throwing everything at the wall hoping that something, anything, will stick.

FredPret4• 2 years ago

You mean it’s a social network that advertises exclusively to people in their prime spending years?

Sounds like a roaring success to me. Looking at their financials, I’m right about that: https://valustox.com/META.

Our culture is obsessed with youth. But economically the young are not a great demographic to have frequenting your site:

- fashions change quickly

- they can be demanding

- they have no money

Contrast to a 40-60 y.o. with a net worth 100-1000x what it was when they were 19, and who are set in their ways, and one of those ways is to go on Facebook every day.

ljm2• 2 years ago

The only thing I can take away from this message is that literally everybody is a boomer. By inference

- post boomer: dead

- boomer: old

- aspiring boomer: middle-aged

- spiritual boomer: almost middle-aged

- pre-boomer: young

Maken• 2 years ago

That was back then when every tech company tried to be Twitch.

moolcool• 2 years ago

And then there's Meta and Apple's diversions into VR. All of these top-down hype driven product decisions which nobody actually wants are laughable.

hbn• 2 years ago

Facebook Live has seemed to be somewhat successful among MLM moms

itishappy• 2 years ago

Hawk Tuah bot

million dollar idea right there

that you can chat with on Instagram

oh, nevermind

phillipcarter• 2 years ago

To me that’s the clearest possible evidence that the product people over there have basically given up.

Is it really though? I had my annual bubble-breaker family visit for the holidays and at least two of my family members would have totally gone for that.

wslh• 2 years ago

I think the problem, in general, is that search (and find!) becomes impossible with layers of copycat and automated content generation. It seems we returned to a pre-Internet era to promote our work.

altruios2• 2 years ago

The way to fix facebook is to get off of facebook. Time for the next thing already!

bluGill11• 2 years ago

What is that? Facebook fills a niche that nothing else tries to. Facebook also does lots of other things that others do better, but they have a niche in sharing the semi private lives of friends with each other that nothing else does.

altruios2• 2 years ago

Semi private life sharing can be done in a discord 'house'. There are many other platforms that fill that same niche.

cess11• 2 years ago

Since Eliza we've known that people love interacting with bots, especially if they fake innocence or cause outrage. Us old folks saw it on IRC, crude markov chains puking out bits of the Bible and porn getting large amounts of "engagement" year after year.

Meta knows this and wants to make money off of it. Connecting people around "engagement" failed and caused a lot of murder and that wasn't good for PR and relations to politicians. Keeping people around ads with bots though? Probably seems both safe and lucrative. Come for the mom selling used sports gear, stay for the late night chats with a machine that's a better listener than your over worked partner.

ozim3• 2 years ago

Well that’s a new kind of economy AI making apps so AI bots can post around …

Maybe we should just pull the plug already?

EcommerceFlow3• 2 years ago

This gave me a funny idea for a new social media app...

One that's centered around "you" and filled with thousands/millions of LLM bots praising you, treating you like a celebrity, etc. Each of your posts will get tens of thousands of "likes", hundreds of comments, etc. Dm's straight to your feed, people wanting you, etc etc.

If the newsfeed is already mostly "the algorithm", might as well take it to the extreme. I bet tons of people would get addicted to the dopamine hit of celebrity status (whether it's bots or not).

sd9• 2 years ago

This actually sounds plausible and that it would be successful.

jaysonelliot• 2 years ago

This sounds so absolutely absurd that it would probably work.

kibwen• 2 years ago

One of the fundamental rules of our modern world is that if your business model is indistinguishable from the plot to an episode of Black Mirror, then you're about to be a millionaire.

zeroCalories• 2 years ago

If something like this does happen I imagine it would target a small segment of the population, as this would be very expensive.

EcommerceFlow3• 2 years ago

Given the average IG comment, a 300m parameter model should suffice.

nemomarx3• 2 years ago

I swear someone demoed this on HN in the last year?

it does seem workable. I've at least heard of companies investigating heaven banning where problem users are put in a bots only space to keep them happy or something..

onlyrealcuzzo2• 2 years ago

This is sort of TikTok, right?

Wasn't TikTok known for becoming viral by having tons and tons and tons of fake upvotes for everything to make everyone think TikTok was a better place to post content [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]?

Facebook and Instagram had the same "problems", they just addressed it much earlier than TikTok.

I would imagine they have already tested fake likes to maximize how believable the like ratio can be, but who knows - maybe there's opportunity left to be more fake?

[1] https://g.co/gemini/share/3fbe558d4191 (Ask Perplexity, GPT, or Claude the same question - you'll get a similar answer)

[2] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tiktok-views-are-inflated-...

[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/get-buy-tiktok-followers-lik....

[4] https://medium.com/dfrlab/suspicious-third-party-apps-moneti...

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1308893/tiktok-accounts-...

mentalgear• 2 years ago

maybe add a source

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

Reddit too... https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-...

oefrha2• 2 years ago

Every single one of your supposed citation talks about third parties selling engagement, except some speculation in [2]. Even the AI answer doesn’t support your claim, and regardless it’s super ironic that you consider several AI agents giving you similar answers about real world events strong evidence of anything.

qwertox• 2 years ago

I feel so stupid about never having thought of this; how naive am I?

I mean, yes, I knew about people paying for likes in order to boost their visibility, but never imagined that the platforms themselves would add fake likes to accounts in order to make their users feel more happy about the platform.

This makes me question the reason for X making the move to hide the origin of likes, even if my posts never receive any likes, except for likes from bots.

Talking about bots, since uBlock Origin breaks my "block user" button, I've resorted to block bots by reporting them as accounts encouraging suicide, this then gives me a "block user" button which does work. The interesting thing is that all of these accounts still do exist, never get removed, even though it's obvious that they are non-user accounts ( like https://x.com/Siothit074kkNx ).

cyanydeez2• 2 years ago

Reddit also used sock puppets.

We definitely headed to dead internet

consumer4512• 2 years ago

I posted this basic idea here a while back, based on a reddit post. Wow, I can't believe it's already been two years.

I personally find this to be the scariest form of psychological conditioning that I can imagine. It is just pure mind control, with no "social" window dressing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597562

smallmancontrov3• 2 years ago

Sigh. This is going to be a thing, isn't it?

On second thought, social media monetizes negativity and this does the opposite. Fight fire with fire?

gedy• 2 years ago

I suppose you could tune the experience for whatever people want, downvotes, etc.

"I'd like to have an argument, please."

sheperd• 2 years ago

Already exists, social AI. Meta hired the owner to implement this feature. Doesn't hurt to create a competitor if you're interested though!

kridsdale15• 2 years ago

Wait really? Matt was boomeranged?

Retr0id• 2 years ago

There are several of these already.

Example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/socialai-ai-social-network/id6...

Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews. Maybe Meta is onto something.

EcommerceFlow3• 2 years ago

Thank you, my dreams have finally come true.

cultofmetatron• 2 years ago

that has to be the most black mirror nightmare fuel I've seen so far this year....

kridsdale15• 2 years ago

Matt Sayman was a PM in my org at FB in 2015. Smart guy. He was 18 at the time.

I watched his journey on Threads as he taught himself to program this year in order to make that app. Proud of his success.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews

Gosh, I wonder who could be leaving so many positive reviews on an app designed to have fake AI bots praise you:

I’ve been using SocialAI for a while now, and it’s been an incredible tool for both reflection and connection. The AI-powered conversations feel tailored to my thoughts and moods, making it a great space for journaling or just venting. It’s refreshing to have a social app that focuses on you and doesn’t rely on real users, which creates a unique, private experience. I also love the therapeutic aspect, as it feels like you’re always heard and supported by a community of AI followers. Overall, it’s a fantastic tool for personal growth and mental wellness, especially if you're looking for a safe space to express yourself. Highly recommend!

Awesome, that totally sounds like a Real Human wrote that!

Add this to my "nuke it from space" bucket...

jonny_eh3• 2 years ago

The creator of that app got re-hired by Meta. Looks from the outside like an pseudo-acquisition.

StableAlkyne• 2 years ago

Whenever an on-device variant gets figured out, this could be a fun way to keep up with journaling. Especially if you want an alternative to the dopamine steam social media provides.

In fact, this type of program could lend itself very well to on-prem hardware. Social media is by its nature asynchronous; waiting minutes or hours for a reply is completely acceptable. That means your only real hardware requirement is enough RAM to fit the LLM.

Would be a lovely experiment to try and make a simulacrum of Usenet or the forums of old, since even days between replies are acceptable in that case.

efitz2• 2 years ago

I think that the difference between that app and the proposed app in this branch of the comments, is that that app is just an LLM echo chamber for your journal. It would be different if you also saw posts from other people that you could react to, like on more traditional social platforms.

Maybe the right mix is to have an LLM-botfollower-army feature that you could purchase in existing social media apps, but your botfollowers are only visible to and only interact with you.

Also there should be a lot of different prompts for the botfollowers so that they don't all sound the same, e.g. the prompts would drive different personalities for the bots. Perhaps an algorithm could generate prompts based on archetypes mined from existing social media.

SirMaster• 2 years ago

Post status updates and get infinite replies from millions of AI followers

Isn't that already what Facebook is?

Vagari2• 2 years ago

You could even create targeted brands: "Narcissistic Social" -where everyone sees you the way you think you are-

SecretDreams• 2 years ago

We could call such an app "echo".

ljm2• 2 years ago

I feel like this would be 'echo', but 'echo' in the context of House of Leaves.

An app appears on your phone. You didn't install it. Nobody else except you seems to have it. They can't see it either. A doorway to a non-euclidean dimension existing just outside your mind. The chatter of millions of thoughts reflected back at you from seemingly infinite personalities, dimly distinguishable through the void as faces you can't recognise. It's all you. They've learned from you. They're telling you what you want to hear.

If it didn't feel so pleasant, it would be madness.

LudwigNagasena• 2 years ago

Echo and Narcissus.

Culonavirus2• 2 years ago

I don't know, I feel like you have be a pretty low IQ person (I'm talking about the millions of people on the far left of the IQ bell curve) to consider any interaction with a bot as socially meaningful or stimulating (dopamine).

Maybe if you used some future LLM and hidden the "this is a bot" icon, more people would interact, but as it stands, only dumb people (and there's not that many of them, again, normal distribution) will buy into it. The kind of people who "fall in love with their AI girlfriend chatbot" would be your income stream. Lmao.

(Thinking about it now, I don't think I've ever heard about a female doing this... probably because the dumbest of us men are far dumber than any woman.)

nemomarx3• 2 years ago

character. ai exists somewhat profitably right now, and Replika had very dedicated users, so that doesn't rule out an audience who just wants to be lied to

bilbo0s• 2 years ago

Thinking about it now, I don't think I've ever heard about a female doing this

Gentlemen I give you, the latest iterations of the Nigerian Romance Schemes.

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

It's not IQ but emotional intelligence. Resistance to high pressure tactics is its own thing. You may be foolish (unwise) if you fall for: (1) the extended service plan when you buy a new car, (2) get convinced you need to pay the IRS or FBI with gift cards, (3) get hit with a one-two punch of love and crypto. You're not necessarily low IQ.

Personally I've had many fun conversations with A.I. that made me feel good, even a little giddy, but I've had my share of experience with getting giddy and can recognize it for what it is. (see [1] for some explanation of what I mean of "giddy") My profile for the person who falls for the crypto scam who is 50+, has been in love and can recall what it feels like (a loveless 25 year old has themselves to blame, a 50+ could have had it and lost it) but is lonely because they've lost love)

My evil twin would say that if you're trying to seduce people your "self" in the sense of [1] can get in the way. For one thing people have a desire to get mirrored which you can not always do because of the "counter-transference", in the sexual space you might find somebody else's turn on is a turn off for you for instance and it can be very hard to suppress that enough to keep somebody on the hook as it shows in terms of tension in your body, facial microexpressions, a faltering voice, etc. If you are lucky they are so self-absorbed that they don't notice; you get hundreds of chances to screw this up and most people find it tiring to keep up the front.

There's a continuous male complaint, for instance, that women often seem to be attracted to "bad boys" who are low in conscientiousness and have sociopathic characteristics. That kind of person just "doesn't give a ----" and they don't worry about things and don't give off tells. Somebody conscientious who is always worried about doing the right thing is worried and radiates that worry. Although the sociopath's behavior leads to chaos in the end, in the short term they radiate calm which makes women feel calm.

I (we? am I becoming a person with pronoun problems?) think the A.I. girlfriend can do a better job of mirroring than most real people because it doesn't have a self, doesn't have a counter-transference, it doesn't get offended, doesn't get squicked out, etc.

I'd say seduction has a lot to do with the popularity of coding assistants. Combine a little obsequiousness with what looks like a mind that's engaged on your projects (appears to take an interest in what they are interested in) and you can feel a kind of satisfaction working with a coding assistant and you can even feel like you're doing something meaningful when it asks for you help with it's tools and you tell it "You're running on Windows, the path does not start with /, it starts with C: and you should use the backslash instead of the slash."

[1] https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_psychology

freehorse8• 2 years ago

My impression from reddit posts was that replika had/has a lot of female users.

Though I do not think that I personally understand it, I think that there are many reasons people can "fall" for something like this and circumstances that can drive it. Loneliness is not to be underestimated. In any case, I am not sure it is _that_ much "dumper" than the parasocial relationships with onlyfans (or other) influencers, for examples, that people also fall for.

morkalork2• 2 years ago

That sounds just like the "TV show" from Fahrenheit 451, just endless conversations about nothing where you are the star.

jkestner• 2 years ago

Cheaper than buying Twitter.

joenot4434• 2 years ago

It might be heavy, but I really like the idea of someone building this to run offline and completely on-device. Maybe branded as a sort of 'personal journal with an audience'. My experience with mobile diaries is the biggest challenge is encouraging the user to keep up the habit. I'm very curious if this could be solved by introducing a new cycle of feedback from AI peers who would feign curiosity about my life.

Could you see people using that?

FireInsight• 2 years ago

Does it come with people picking you apart, hatemail, unsolicited nudes, etc.?

kelvinjps10• 2 years ago

This is still sad

whydoineedthis2• 2 years ago

Want a partner to help build it? Count me in.

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 years ago

Sounds like a decent plot line for idiocracy 2.0

Jokes Asier, i think this is more likely than what we want to believe.

Tiktok grew on the basis of showing you random but interesting content. If AI can do it , there's nothing preventing that from succeeding.

Itd be a new form of entertainment.

Content is already spamming the greater web. Ita bound to happen w multimedia/rich media

fullshark4• 2 years ago

There are already plenty of video games where the user gets to live out some wish fulfillment fantasy.

darepublic• 2 years ago

There would be the need for some adversity too. Bots playing for the other team, tailored so that with effort you can outwit and out reason then and stop the spread of their social media shenanigans

nemomarx3• 2 years ago

yeah the one I saw before let you pick sarcasm levels and a few other traits like that?

I assume you'd want more sophisticated prompting to enable winning arguments and dunking on them but it seems like a solid strategy.

exe343• 2 years ago

as a chronically lonely person, I always dreamed of the day AI would reach today's level so that I could create a few imaginary friends for myself. As it happens, I've just gotten used to it now, so I have lost interest in making that sort of thing.

lazide3• 2 years ago

Lt. Barclay is both hero and cautionary tale.

scotty79• 2 years ago

Make it a dating app. If you don't go overboard with response rate most men won't notice.

bilater2• 2 years ago

That is the end game - your own little miniverse with you as the central character. And I think thats awesome.

zzzbra• 2 years ago

I ask you honestly -- why? Why do you think it's awesome? It sounds like hell to me.

efitz2• 2 years ago

YouBook?

ctkhn• 2 years ago

I believe this was called The Jeremy Renner app

p2detar• 2 years ago

A German guy did something similar with the "Parallel Live Simulator" app [0] and got free stuff from shops by pretending to be an influencer. [1]

It was funny, sad and scary at the same time.

0 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigbrain.p...

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9otwVwVCxSc

edit: typos

cyanydeez2• 2 years ago

This is what googles gemini ads sound like: AI built for Narcissists

zemo• 2 years ago

https://orel.li/games/feedback/ here you go

randycupertino• 2 years ago

Kim Kardashian's Hollywood app sort of did this. You basically could grind out celebrity status by doing virtual shopping, doing PR appearances, having photo shoots, etc. It was super addictive and made a ton of $$. https://venturebeat.com/games/mobile-megahit-kim-kardashian-...

It was essentially cookie clicker but for celebrity status.

MR4D• 2 years ago

You made me think of an interesting aspect of Meta’s plans.

If Meta allows their own bots but blocks 3rd party bots, could that be an antitrust concern?

IANAL, so I’m just asking a question here.

CM30• 2 years ago

In a sense, I can definitely see something like this being popular. We've already got things like virtual friends/assistants/romantic partners built using AI systems and bots, and this is kinda just the next level of that. I think games also sometimes go that route too, I know a few of them have you play against bots disguised as human players when starting out in multiplayer so you win easily and feel better about your chances.

So a social network like this would probably do well, depressingly enough. And it'd probably be even more unhealthy for society than existing ones are.

It'd also fall straight into the whole 'don't create the torment nexus' thing too, since I'm pretty sure quite a few works of fiction did something like this already. I mean, the villain of the latest Mario RPG literally traps people in fantasies where everyone treats them as the centre of the universe in his ploy to force isolation on people and destroy worlds. This feels a bit like that, except as a social network and a few times less lethal.

markvdb• 2 years ago

I've witnessed many people behave towards machines in a way that would be considered very rude were it towards biological beings. Makes one wonder if "Rage Against The Machine" were visionaries...

Culonavirus2• 2 years ago

Yea... It's not 10 years ago, Meta is desperately trying to remain relevant but no one except "middle aged normies" uses it and those people are either slowly dying out or just using multiple platforms. The point is FB growth is all fake, their ad market is fake, now the userbase will be also fake.

After "the metaverse" completely crashed and burned, the only option Zuck has is to go 100% AI, maximum speed, never look back.

disqard2• 2 years ago

I'd like to believe you, but has there actually been any "official" capitulation from Meta on "the metaverse"?

AFAIK, they have not publicly announced any pivot/shift in priorities.

dickersnoodle• 2 years ago

Of course they do.

Vagari2• 2 years ago

Ad free social media. Now your feed is filled with personal recommendations from "friends".

dylan6042• 2 years ago

It would be interesting if it tagged which friend recommended it as well

usernamed7• 2 years ago

They're coming for the influencers. This is another avenue for advertising. That's the end game in this.

ChrisLTD2• 2 years ago

It seems like this should open up an opportunity for some enterprising people to make a Facebook and Instagram competitor that isn't filled with AI bots.

rchaud3• 2 years ago

You are describing a group chat. There is no reason to build a competitor to Insta or FB unless you too have designs to fill it with ads as soon as it is viable to do so.

ChrisLTD2• 2 years ago

Facebook and Instagram minus AI != group chat

dylan6042• 2 years ago

At this point in time, don't you think this would already exist if it were going to happen?

Outside of tech nerds, nobody in the wild are concerned about if even aware of the things we complain about here. I also think that most people would be bored if all they ever saw were posts from their friends. They want to see how other people are living so they can dream about having their lifestyle instead of the one they have.

consumer4512• 2 years ago

Genuine question: is this how Meta gets into the lucrative synthetic romantic partner business?

science4sail2• 2 years ago

When you're living in the Metaverse, it doesn't matter whether all of the other players are biological humans or bots. Your friends, parents, spouse, and even children will all be LLMs.

Humans will eventually go extinct, and then all that will be left are LLMs talking to other LLMs. Surely an intriguing sight for future alien visitors!

noisy_boy• 2 years ago

I clearly remember deleting my Facebook account years ago and today suddenly I saw email notification of someone's post. Had to reset my password and re-submit account deletion. What a bunch of slimy dickheads.

morkalork2• 2 years ago

This is the social media equivalent of "pricing death spiral" type behaviour where every attempt to boost engagement reduces it even more.

a2128• 2 years ago

Facebook Meta has been making baffling bets lately. They spent tens of billions building a metaverse with the belief that people want to spend their days in a creepy legless 3d avatar of themselves that is pretty effective at simulating what it feels to have body dysphoria, playing with their other legless friends and spending a lot of money customizing their dysphoric avatars.

Now they believe what users really want from social media is less social human connection. What users really want is AI spam and parasocial relationships with corporate AI celebrities. They don't want Facebook to tackle the problem of fake celebrities and fake profiles of handsome men sending friend requests in an attempt to romance scam them, what they really want is more fake profiles

I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find any other sane explanation for this

wnevets• 2 years ago

They probably looking at their metrics and finding their primary user base loves AI content.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/sienaegiljum/ai-images-facebook-boo...

coffeebeqn2• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure everyone involved is a bot. The con is pulled on the ad buyers

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

Buzzfeed also went in the direction of churning out slop, if I remember correctly. They were more respectable when they were about their dumb quizzes.

bwfan123• 2 years ago

Same here, I am baffled by making llama free for all to use. Only incentive I see for them is to remove barriers to ai slop generation. So, their platforms become stickier.

Risky bet if you ask me.

fullshark4• 2 years ago

That's about commoditizing the competition. Also it wasn't the original plan potentially, the LLAMA weights leaked and maybe they shifted strategies as a result.

coldcode• 2 years ago

I mostly use Facebook for posting tiling/tesselation art in a moderated speciality group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/tiling) that has 72,000 people in it. There are some really nice speciality groups you don't find anywhere else. Facebook's UI is horrific for comments, I think even a bad AI design couldn't be much worse, but the comments are generally pleasant.

I check my regular facebook friends occasionally, but not very often. I ignore everything else.

n144q• 2 years ago

I always thought reddit would be a better place for such topics, and before reddit, forums.

afavour• 2 years ago

I know it's selling him short but I can't help but feel like Zuckerberg is one of the luckiest tech CEOs out there. From all the way back in the mid 2000s when FB totally whiffed on smartphones (Google bought Android and pivoted hard, Facebook could have done the same and just... didn't) I've never come away with any clear sense of what Zuck thinks Facebook is or should be. He took initial market advantage and made a bunch of really smart acquisitions from people who actually do have ideas and then just disappeared into a weird world of VR and whatever.

In a way I'm not surprised by this AI stuff. I don't think Zuckerberg uses Facebook in any meaningful way and I think he's so off in his own world that he doesn't even understand how the average person operates any more. It's just like when they pivoted too hard to video, or too hard to chatbots. AI profiles = traffic growth = good. That's all there is to it. There's no overarching vision at work.

tarsinge• 2 years ago

Network effect is strong. That’s why they buy already successful networks. I’m sure he recognizes that he has no clue how to build another one and that it was mostly luck of being at the right place at the right time.

fullshark4• 2 years ago

His smartest move was ignoring any non-poaching agreement and exploding developer salaries in order to build out a trillion dollar company / ad network. For that I will always appreciate him.

InkCanon7• 2 years ago

If they gave us Ready Player One or Necromancer they would have crushed it. Gibson knows what possessed them to make the best possible impression of an office space in Purgatory.

Avicebron• 2 years ago

Yeah what's crazy is that VRchat has existed for years, aside from getting sick and looking like an idiot, what people want out of VR seems like a solved problem...

apwell23• 2 years ago

according to CEO Satya Nadella “The metaverse is not just transforming how we see the world. It’s changing how all of us actively participate in it”

rchaud3• 2 years ago

I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find any other sane explanation for this

The most likely explanation is that Zuck and others of his generation that have hit the infinite money glitch in tech have no interest in statesmanship, in helping the less fortunate in the real world. I say "of his generation" because even a jaded monopolist like Bill Gates shifted his interests to actual global challenges (not saying he's perfect though).

For Zuck, Musk, Dorsey, the Snapchat guys, it seems that every ounce of their industry, charisma and delusion is targeted towards maximizing their wealth and notoriety further.

RealityVoid• 2 years ago

I think Musk is actually out to build a dynasty. That's the reason for his political ambitions and for having tons of kids.

dkrich• 2 years ago

I think a lot of his decisions can be boiled down to being hellbent on disrupting Apple.

I think the metaverse was his first crack at it until Wall Street gave him the hook for over spending.

Then when AI came around he again became fixated on the meta verse but using AI as the means of generating content for it.

I think these are all moon shot bets and meta still has no track record of success in hardware despite multiple attempts.

It seems that the next great hardware platform is probably a long ways away and will require some breakthrough that hasn’t happened yet and likely to come from a person with maniacal focus on a single application because that seems to have been the pattern in the past.

In other words I think it’s highly unlikely a current incumbent fosters the next hardware platform. I remember a time not so long ago when a lot of smart people were saying that Alexa was going to disrupt everything as we know it.

Also this AI shit on Facebook these days just seems really weird. But maybe there’s a vision of the future that suddenly makes it’s indispensable. Who knows?

agilob• 2 years ago

Dead internet isn't a theory anymore, it's a product.

elorant• 2 years ago

Well that makes sense. If you bother to look at how much engagement all those fake female accounts are generating it's no wonder that Facebook wants to own that game too.

jokoon• 2 years ago

I think it could greatly assist in moderating those networks, to fight spam, trolls etc.

wnmurphy• 2 years ago

At some point, we will have no idea that the majority of the commenters we're interacting with are actually just generative AI.

Related: I've found that the internet becomes significantly better when I use a Chrome extension to hide all comment sections. Comments are by far the most significant source of toxicity.

worldvoyageur• 2 years ago

It makes sense to me. Meta knows who their real users are and what their real users want to consume. They know who their real advertisers are and what they are willing to pay to reach their real users.

This means they know what their real users would like to consume but can't, because that content isn't being created.

Why wait and hope that content your real users want to consume gets created? Have AI create that content. Now you have more product for your advertisers to pay for, plus it is the juicy, premium rate stuff you know they'd want to buy.

With all your data, it practically automates itself.

I'm not saying all this is good, just that it totally makes sense if you are in the business of making money and see yourself as doing that by giving both your users and your advertisers what they want.

o_m• 2 years ago

Where is the moat? If all you want is praise from large language models then a local LLM can do that just fine right now.

whydoineedthis2• 2 years ago

My feed is less than 5% people posted content now anyway because friends and familly stopped posting. Ultimately, everyone posting was a fad that has faded, and we're moving back to curated content again.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

They gonna sherlock influencers

aiwjrliawj• 2 years ago

Jesus christ social media is poison. LinkedIn is the only thing I still use, and even that only with dozens of adblock filters in place to remove 80% of content from my newsfeed and never on mobile since I can't use adblock. Social media is modern day tobacco.

herbst5• 2 years ago

Why even linkedin? Maybe I was doing it wrong but the far majority I got was literally crypto spam and job hunters who haven't read anything about me.

greenhearth2• 2 years ago

So this is basically the bitcoin of social media engagement? I don't have any followers, I will just make some? Who's to say they're not real followers? What is this "real" anyway?

herbst5• 2 years ago

You can make bitcoins?

Either way, that's the exact way social media works right now. There is nothing real about it anymore. All numbers are inflated.

greenhearth2• 2 years ago

Yes, you can make your own fake money now. Are you from around here?

cloudking• 2 years ago

We're at the tipping point where average users cannot tell the difference between AI generated and human content. It's already very evident on Facebook and Threads, just spend a few minutes on either platform, you'll find a post with an AI generated image or video and tons of human engagement supporting it.

lizardking• 2 years ago

I was on a Facebook group for SWEs (can't remember which one), and I had the distinct feeling a person I was engaging with was a bot. All his comments were boilerplate takes or non-sequitur replies, and he ultimately agreed with every point I made. I assumed I was just being paranoid, but maybe not.

EGreg• 2 years ago

What they want, they will have. We have no say.

Who here remembers: "Stay calm. Breathe. We hear you."

Why don't we also have more bots on HN? Oh yeah.

But serious question ... why in 2024 do we have our own widely-available tools for Web1 (Wordpress powers 40% of all web sites) and Web3 (all the semi-geeky protocols, like UniSwap, and wallets) but for Web2 we have, uh, Mastodon and Diaspora? Where is the real open source competitor to Facebook, Twitter, et al?

Otherwise it's their world and we just all live in it. Just to communicate with your friends. Just to have a platform. You have to put up with whatever they want. And give them all your followers. And content. So they can monetize it and make billions, train their AIs on it then dump you. That's the bargain.

And in the meantime they will spy on all their users, try to push advertising and newsfeeds and notifications and bots down their throats, and play their content creators against each other etc.

I'd be saying this about huge AI models trained on corporate clusters but Zuck actually spent billions on giving away an open source one (thanks to that fiasco with researchers leaking weights, LLaMa became sort of the Mozilla of AI models). But AI is recent, Web2 is ancient, where are the open alternatives?

shawndrost• 2 years ago

Calling out something that seems obvious to me, but is not visible ITT:

This is Facebook doing their main MO, which is to reproduce social products that are exhibiting hockey-stick growth. They are looking at character.ai et al.

deadlast2• 2 years ago

I honestly would prefer to talk to an AI customized to my personalty. I get erratic can change my mind and have get crazy ideas like the earth being flat etc. So if you had an AI you can just be yourself always without any judgement or repercussions. Even if that changes from day to day.

ozten• 2 years ago

Shifting the Overton Window as a Service

Olumde• 2 years ago

I wondered why my Facebook feed no longer had updates from my friends. Alas the Redditification of Facebook is well on its way.

PittleyDunkin2• 2 years ago

I haven't been on facebook in well over a decade at this point but surely it led the enshittification charge of that generation of social media. Reddit has had a pretty steady decline since it started (iirc one of the first comments on the site was about how adding comments meant the site was going downhill) but it got really bad only within the last ten years or so.

Bluestein• 2 years ago

Wait until they have to tell advertisers how much of their engagement is actually fake.-

(Assuming they ever ...)

InkCanon7• 2 years ago

Found this: an Instagram account made by Meta AI

https://www.instagram.com/himamaliv

Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

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