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.
Obviously this is all stupid and you’ll find problems anywhere you choose to look.
The problem I’m finding is this, if Facebook truly is betting on AI becoming better as a way to encourage growth then why are they further poisoning their own datasets? Like ok, even if you exclude everything your own bots say from your training data, which you could probably do since you know who they are, this is still encouraging more AI slop on the platform. You don’t know how much of the “engagement” your driving (which they are likely just turning around and feeding back into the AI training set) is actually human, AI grifter, or someone poisoning the well by making your AIs talk to themselves. If you actually cared to make your AI better, then you can’t use any of the responses to your bots as most of them will be of dubious providence at best.
Personally I’m rooting on the coming Hapsburg-AI issue so I don’t really have that much of a problem with Facebook deciding more poison is a brilliant business move. But uh… seems real dumb if your actually interested in having an actually functional LLM.
I don’t think people are getting that they are going to sell this as a service to corporations. Kind of like selling positive feedback on Amazon if Amazon did or does that. They’re not trying to boost numbers, but sell people saying what the company wants them to say. This can be anything from politics to buying a certain product.