Don’t worry they will be back. Either from a 3rd party of they sneak a warning about the use of AI accounts in their Terms Of Service on page 350
Dumb fucks.
It’s a big irony to me that they were making users show their driver’s license to ensure they were real people, and then the platform itself makes fake people.
Right, and what’s even as bizarre to me (as an engineer) is that they’re bots posing as people.
That’s arguably the most deceptive and malicious way to use a bot on a site meant for real people.
But they’ll quickly block any helpful bots anyone else tries to integrate on the platform.
“Our bad bots good, your good bots bad”. What a crazy world we live in.
“Our bad bots good, your good bots bad”.
Textbook big brother stuff. We’re in 1984 but the corpos are the ones providing the daily hate
This is true.
How the tables have turned. They are actively abusing their users instead of protecting them.
Internet is becoming more like cable TV where these Social media companies produce content and all users become consumers. You are allowed to technically post but organic community interaction will die down and everyone becomes lurkers.
This has turned no tables whatsoever, Facebook/Meta was founded under the intention of abusing their users.
I think the table turning is in terms of what constitutes “content”, ostensibly the reason you’re on their service.
Standard tables: you sign up to this website to see stuff posted by people and pages you want to see, you can post your own if you wish
New and improved AI tables: bend over and enjoy the warmth of the slop cannon interspersed with Enhanced Consumer AI Personalized Advertising Experiences™
The user abuse was always part of the process no doubt.
I mean, we are, as a society, aware that social media is just entertainment and not true communication, right? Right?
Entertainment through parasocial relationships and voyeurism. And you can have parasocial relationships with people you actually know, not just celebrities and influencers.
i find it incredible that despite having access to basically unlimited information about its users, facebook makes stupid decisions that seem almost designed to piss off its users. and then you have situations like this, where facebook was told ahead of time that this decision would make a lot of people angry, and then facebook went and did it anyway only to walk it back a few days later and say it was a mistake. why?
Remember when Google Glass generated backlash?
Now we have those AI pins that have a camera and mic, multiple smart glasses with HUDs and cameras, Smart Home devices that record constantly).Try it -> Backlash -> Walk it back
Try again 5 months later -> No backlash -> Continuewhile it is no doubt the case that most big tech companies are engaged in perpetual wars of attrition against their users, i can’t help but feel that this AI posters thing is different from the examples you provided. at least in those examples, the users have something to gain from sacrificing their privacy. and the company also stands to gain something as well. (although typically the company stands to gain way more from these exchanges.) but in this case, i’m not really sure how anyone benefits. nobody seems to want to be tricked into talking to an AI, and i don’t see how that would make the company more money. maybe they think it would drive up “engagement” somehow? but that seems like a hard thing to accurately predict. it seems more likely that zuckerberg is convinced that AI is automatically good in any tech company, and this is the most obvious way to shove AI into social media websites. so therefore it must be a good idea somehow.
To see if the backlash is really that bad, to see if there are specific issues people object to, to see if there are certain demographics more strongly opposed, to desensitise people for when they try it next time (“ugh, again?” instead of the full outrage), to give people the illusion of control (look, online complaints work!)…
There are a lot of possible reasons, but I doubt it’s an entirely ignorant decision coming from a company known to be good at manipulating it’s users.
but I doubt it’s an entirely ignorant decision coming from a company known to be good at manipulating it’s users.
Damn good point! As a counter, corporate leadership is often surrounded by yes men and insulated from the masses. The meta verse and apples AR flop cost them a lot of money as a result. (Not sure if fb totally gave up on meta tbh)
Also a good point. Personally, I’m not willing to extend the charity of Hanlon’s Razor to corporations well known to be malicious. In this event, I’d rather be wrong than off-guard, if that makes sense?
The meta verse and apples AR flop cost them a lot of money as a result.
I think this is more of a case where the mandate to always increase profits compelled them to take calculated financial risks and hope to be the vanguard of a new boom. Well, maybe the calculations were more estimates, but I assumed they figured out they could afford the loss if it flopped, but would make major gains by securing a foothold in a new digital space if it succeeded.
Consider how occasionally niche technologies once mocked later turn out to be hits. I remember once reading somewhere that QR codes were a fad, had died out and were basically useless, for instance, and I bought it because I myself saw decreasing use of them. At the time, I think QR code scanners weren’t built into smartphone camera apps, and smartphones weren’t as ubiquitous either, so unless you downloaded dedicated (and in retrospect sketchy) apps for it, they remained useless.
Now, I see QR codes everywhere. My company has them on meeting rooms to check their occupation and book them right from your phone without needing to remember or manually enter the room number. Our printers have QR codes for email templates to report errors to IT that include technical details for the printer. Restaurants have QR codes for digital ordering, invoices for automatically scanning the payment details from your banking app, the list goes on.
Obviously, the financial scale is far different, but that’s the example that came to mind just now seeing a QR code in my train for digital schedules including current delay. I’m sure there are better examples I could think of, but it’s eight in the morning and my long-term memory won’t come online for another hour or so.
My point is that it’s sometimes hard or impossible to predict whether something will succeed, but the nature of corporate economics in the tech sphere compells taking risks on new innovations because the potential payoff is immense. And if they can afford to take it - they’re not exactly short on money and not particularly worried about their users running away over it - I don’t know if they can afford not to. Who knows what new tech people might surprisingly latch on to?
I do think you’re right, but I don’t think it’s the only reason for doing things we think are stupid. The tech sphere in particular has a lot of survivorship bias, but while small companies might disintegrate over a failure, a giant corporation can take the hit and keep trying for the next gold rush.
As media scrutiny ticked up Friday, Meta began taking down Liv and other bots’ posts, many of which dated back at least a year, citing a “bug.”
Funny how that works. I don’t think the main talking point is the issue that they couldn’t be blocked on Instagram. That is a non-answer to the question of why the decision to unleash these creepy, fake users into the wild was made in the first place. Full fledged features aren’t suddenly mistakes just because they’re getting backlash now. It seems like they’re not sorry and they’re going to keep trying.
In particular, there was “Liv,” the Meta AI account that has a bio describing itself as a “Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” and told Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah that Liv had no Black creators — the bot said it was built by “10 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Asian male,” according to a screenshot posted on Bluesky
I think the
Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-tellerbit explains perfectly why they released the bots onto the wild. They are there to spread misinformation and guide conversations through the use of that misinformation hoping that you don’t notice and even sympathise with their manipulation machine.think the
Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-tellerbit explains perfectly why they released the bots onto the wild.This was my first thought too. It’s a peek behind the curtain to how “sophisticated” disinformation bots have actually become, and it’s super interesting that there’s backlash to it as most FB users love AI slop.
Maybe Meta’s actually taking it down because they don’t want people to start realizing how much of the social media they interact with is actually AI/LLM/chatbots.
Inadequately punished crimes are either a trial run or the cost of doing business to those sociopaths.
They’re not even trying… It’s obvious this has been a strategy and not a bug, and the ““apology””/excuse sounds like a boilerplate justification from someone who assumes everyone but them is an idiot.
And, realistically speaking, there’s no reason for them to care in the first place. It’s not like everyone’s stopped using Facebook so far for any of their shady shit, and they’ve pulled FAR worse shit than bot accounts.
Everyone now understands the limits and they’ll take full advantage of the buffer before hitting said limit - be less moronic than Musk and you’re golden. It’s really not that high of a bar for them.
Edit, to dispel any potential misunderstanding: I’m not defending them with my last statement, that’s just how it is! If anything, it is our, the consumers’, fault for putting up with this in the first place!
This has been going on for quite some time, and will just continue in the background. I always had suspicions about all the positive comments on advertisements. This just confirms that they’re faking engagement numbers.
Wait, you’re telling me that people respond on ads? That’s fucken crazy.
I cant confirm on this as I deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago, plus run ad-blockers. If I was in marketing and Meta told me there were positive reactions to our ad campaigns running on their site, I would take their metrics with a large pinch of salt.
Delete your Meta accts/apps instead
Can’t, already did ~10 years ago.
no no keep the bot accounts so we can get a second
Redditfacebook exodus waveI’m not sure I want the reddit/fb,/twitt people here. I personally think not having them here makes lemmy a better place, people are generally nicer here and I like that. The larger lemmy gets the bigger target we are for those large scale misinformation campaigns as well.
true
Somehow meta is only in the press for its mistakes. Are they just not doing anything well, except for keeping Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp running?
It’s simple: They don’t do anything good
Nothing but a net-negative to society, across the board.
I mean have you heard of Llama, pytorch or Orion?
Are you only looking at Lemmy? Because you’re not going to see positive press about Meta here.
I could go dig up positive news about them if you want, but you’d be better off doing that yourself.
I was wondering what would happen if you asked it to send you money.
I like that. “This is the Madison sheriff’s department. Your grandson Chris has been arrested and needs bail. We’ll accept payment in the form of a gift card.”
Even modest hardware can run a decent LLM. Maybe someone will open source a project to let people make their own avatars explicitly to poison the social media sites.
I’d really appreciate a low cost, high VRAM GPU to bring fancier LLMs to the average person. It would make the well poisoning that much more convincing.
