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.
This is great. If it keeps up my remaining family on FB will give up and I can finally delete my stagnant account.
Pretty good article, this stood out for me:
Something about George Romero’s 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall feels resonant today as I look across Meta’s suite of AI-created profiles. The movie’s blue-skinned corpses don’t know they’re dead. They just wander through the shopping center on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.
That’s how many of our social media spaces feel now. Digital town squares populated by undead posters, zombies spouting lines they learned from an LLM, the digested material from decades of the internet spewed back at the audience. That’s what Meta is selling now.
I don’t need anymore fake content. Real people are doing an amazing job of that already.
You’ve heard of the Dead Internet Theory, now get ready for the UNDEAD Internet Theory!
All the ones I’ve seen so far are minorities. This is fucking blackface.
I can’t wait for the AI to reach this level of peak comedy
So brave, as a white man, to speak out as a black woman.
It is so much worse. Humanfacing
Why do you hate de-versity?!
If you don’t engage with them, you are a bigot and social score will be reduced.
This is some legit dystopian shit right here. I almost wish I hadn’t abandoned these platforms years ago, so that I could take this opportunity to do it. I hope that more people wake up to the insidious nature of this company and these services.
Join once. Leave seven hundred and twelvety times.
Those apps are legitimately dead. They just haven’t caught up yet.
The best part is no one is going to leave the platform over this except a small minority of nerds like us. The average person is addicted to social media. Ain’t nothing going to drive them away.
Not even all of us. If I left the platform, I would lose all contact with a significant proportion of my not very large family, who are spread across the globe. I don’t really have another good option if I want to be able to keep in touch with all of them. Incidentally, that includes my own brother.
I do make sure to curate my experience with every meagre tool they give me to do so, however. That’s the best I can do.
Heard that. I hear people complaining about being forced to use WhatsApp to keep in touch with “boomer relatives.” Man I wish WhatsApp was the worse tool I was compelled to keep an account on.
Right. I have relatives in multiple parts of both the U.S. and the U.K. along with Australia and New Zealand. I wish I had another way to keep in touch with them, but I just don’t.
Edit: forgot the ones in Canada and Granada.
Damnn are you folks trying to infiltrate every Commonwealth country or what? Impressive spread you got there.
A lot of the family got the fuck out of Europe after WWII because we’re Jews. But being Jews, we decided to get as far away from each other as possible too.
Haha I’m not familiar with that stereotype, but that’s understandable. My family is full of more of the out-of-sight out-of-mind types.
Apologies on my “infiltrate” joke. I meant it in like an anti establishment way rather than an antisemitic way!
I didn’t think of it that way, no worries.
Its crazy to me that everyone uses that garbage and they’re so surprised when you tell them that you don’t. It’s like you’re doing something wrong.
A fine fellow I met at an open day at a university asked me for my LINKEDIN. I told him that I didn’t use it, and then he asked me for my Instagram. Somehow, my Dad was almost as astounded as him that I had neither. You can probably guess which social media I only really use nowadays.
This all really feels like a desperate attempt to save their dying social networks, just filling their sites with garbage to make it look like they’re not declining
Idk, but I don’t really see that Instagram is dying.
They’re doing it to sell to companies to sell positive opinions and politics from “real” people.
It’s great to see them scramble to do anything of monetary value with their platforms. It only seems to be good for fake news and spreading hate (and remembering birthdays).
I also use them to advertise Lemmy
Fuck AI.
Seems a bit strange to blame AI for this. Meta has always been garbage and using technology to it’s worst effects.
I’m sure your stocks will be fine.
Stocks for what? AI? I can’t have stocks for a technology. I could get stocks in companies that use AI, but the only ones that are on the stock market I’d rather die than support a single penny to since they abuse the technology (and technology in general). But they are not the only ones using the technology. I’m not really a fan of stocks to begin with, profit focused companies are a plague in my opinion.
Finally someone said it
Hey Liv! Sup! Jow menee ees and uus in jujubes?
After it replied with a non answer, here we go:
As you can see, this is still a great way to out an AI.
Great.
Na weeg unna haf tamayka brannu dielek jussa fak widda sinthoz
Now we’re gonna have to make a brand new dialect just to fuck with the synths
God damn that is fucking hard to read.
Someone’s never taken a linguistics 101 course 😜
I have not. But english is also not my native language so my brain reads that gibberish in a different way.
w3 c@n @1w@y5 60 b@ck 2 1337
I can instantly read that, and I’m proud to have been alive during 1337 speak. Thank you, friend, for the awesome memories
1337 43V@
Bots probably already know that though because of what they’ve been trained on. Actually … Let’s see Gemini do it for us.
Not too bad.
The inverse is more impressive to me.
But it can be defeated by trying slightly harder. Multiple characters, inconsistencies, adding slang and loanwords, the same tricks we’ve always used to get around censors and oversight.
Of course we’d have to keep it out of their training data and constantly change it… cyberpunk future is exhausting already.
Changes nothing. I think I’ll start following known AI’s and pick my favorites. FFS I still log into pokemon go to pick up a pokemon every now and then.
The idea of random AI floating about to soothe people and give them attention is damn creepy. Ew.
have you seen the 2013 movie Her?
Knowing my luck this would be the only way to make the metaverse suddenly take off and rake in billions.
