5 ms·

To bring socializing back to social networks, apps try A.I. imagery

31 points by amichail 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gumballindie 3y ago
If anything, ai will alienate people from social networks. Fakery is already plenty, more will make alienation worse.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Ye I happened to visit Reddit during the mod drama, and I noticed how all the bigger subs had this bot feeling to it. It was nothing like it used to feel when I used Reddit 10 years ago. It was like, as if 95% of the comments were from bots. Not the top voted ones, but the tail on those comments. And the bots seemed to just agree to whatever they were answering to with vague context feedback. The mix I anticipate is like every other user raging at every other user for being wrong, sorta.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Reddit has been not Reddit for a long time now. I still remember when the death of Fup, the store cat from Powell's Technical Books in Portland, OR, made the front page of Reddit. But both Reddit and Portland have long since been enshittified from how I remember them.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    I don't think it's bots, I see these sort of people in real life, it's most people in some circles. They are playing a little social game where you bet on a what a socially acceptable opinion is and if you guess right you get dopamine in the form of likes. This concensus seeking feedback loop results predictably in a hivemind.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Maybe, it is hard to prove the "dead internet theory". But I mean look at you. That is how it used to feel like on Reddit. Write stuff. Someone disagrees. Etc. Reddit gives me sect vibes nowadays.
      - hftthw 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Why not both? Because of Reddit's api changes it's harder to track this, but at one point it was pretty easy to find accounts that only posted comments that had already been posted in the past. Now, it's difficult to trace most comments under 7 or 8 words, but there were accounts that only had ever posted replies from other users. Just watching some threads in popular subs for replies that were exactly the same as others. Then trace both accounts. Sometimes one is a legitimate human, and one is a bot. Other times both accounts where pretty much every post in their account is something that had been previously posted.
      - lazystar 3y ago
        what if every post in the thread above me is from an ai bot... what if im the only human on hackernews? ive never met anyone irl whos been on this site. honk if youre human.
    - seneca 3y ago
      Yes, exactly this. It's a form of a Keynesian beauty contest. That essentially means to make your comment based not on what you think, but on what you think will be popular with others. It's the heart of modern social media. It abdicates opinion to the masses and drives the hive mind.
      - bitwize 3y ago
        It's called "social proof". You see this a lot in Japanese culture, it seems that all of Japan goes nuts for one thing or another that sweeps the entire nation like falling cherry blossoms in spring. When I was in Japan in 2011, young Japanese women were pretty eager to make smalltalk with me (most likely to practice their English, I'm not gonna lie about how much of a stud I am), and they tended to ask me similar smalltalky questions like "Who's your favorite musician?" I would try to explain as best I could who the KLF is, and then I would turn it around and ask "who's yours?" Every single girl had the exact same answer: Lady Gaga. Every. Single. Girl. Born This Way had just dropped in Japan, so there was a lot of promotion and Lady Gaga was everywhere in Japanese media, so Lady Gaga was the safe favorite artist to have at that moment in time; because everybody else apparently likes her, you won't be thought of as weird or an outcast for doing so, or be put in my unfortunate position of having to explain who the artist is and why their peculiar work is so captivating. That's social proof in a nutshell. Similar things that literally all of Japan was fond of at the time included One Piece (which is evergreen) and the cartoon character Stitch of Lilo & Stitch fame (an anime featuring him was running at the time). I saw Stitch and his girlfriend Angel crop up in some weird places, including on a poster in an elderly gentleman's ramen shop which was otherwise free of pop culture; just a grotty CRT TV with a Hanshin Tigers game on.
  - hightrix 3y ago
    I noticed the exact same thing. In the midst of the protests, it felt like reddit turned on the "AI comment bots" and then just let them run. I rarely saw insightful comments or comments that aren't just repeated/reposted comments from the last time the link was posted. Reddit says "we did it" in response to the protest, but it really feels empty these last couple of months. This was almost as noticeable as during the 2016 election when the general sentiment of the site went from Pro-Sanders to Pro-Clinton, literally over night. The tinfoil hatters blame the Correct The Record group becoming active at that time. Along with the more recent changes of adding paid upvotes along with contributor rewards and then removing the ability to opt-out of ad-personalization, reddit management seems to have a one track mind. Profitability at the expense of anything, including the userbase.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  AI has changed the game for content uploaded to the Internet. I haven't seen an Asian girl in the last two years who doesn't run a filter on her images/videos 24x7. I know I try not to upload any images of myself that haven't at least been tweaked by AI, if nothing else than to improve the lighting etc. Shit, I even run my comments through ChatGPT before I post them if I feel like they could be improved. We're living in a strange time.
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    This is wild to me. You could just not do though things and I genuinely believe the world will feel a bit less strange for you personally.
  - coffeefirst 3y ago
    Honest question: why? I get color correction, but for the rest, what's the appeal?
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      Just trying to present my best self to the world. Online is like a whole separate personality for me, so it's like creating a character that I play.
      - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        But what if those worlds collide sometimes? I’m thinking specifically about (overly) enhanced photos of yourself.
        qingcharles 3y ago
        They're never overly enhanced. I would bet 99.9% of people who see them just think "damn, this guy is good at taking photos" and don't guess I tweaked them.
        3y ago
jasonsb 3y ago
Social media as we knew it 10 years ago is dead and nothing will bring it back. OK, maybe "nothing" is an exaggeration, but we can safely exclude AI. AI will not bring back anything related to social networks.
- XorNot 3y ago
  I would argue social media started dying all on its own anyway: I remember the novelty of Facebook wearing off quickly when the most active subset of people on it all decided to just use it to cross post self promotion about their careers, and I had the "right, I don't actually care about people I went to high school with at all" moment.
- barrenko 3y ago
  Media itself might be dead.
  - garba_dlm 3y ago
    nah, but the way in which ownership over media works right now (20th century style) cannot hold. media itself will adapt, change, morph or something
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Eh, media dying would probably be better for us... current evolution of media isn't taking it towards a destination where it's beneficial to the user. Much like the morphing of staph into MSRA.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- benreesman 3y ago
  Social media companies have the most defensible datasets with actual longitudinal human behavior. If you want some big graph attention mechanism to know if people are going to get divorced? Just to pick an example. AI will bring back the IP trench warfare about the “graph”, twist: they don’t care if it gets updated.
13years 3y ago
This works as a novelty for a moment's interest. However, it quickly fades as AI is making authenticity a crisis of meaning. The new Meta announcements are bringing a flood of new gimmickery to the social platforms. More fake realities. I'm not sure where all this leads society, but I used AI art as a launch into deeper introspection of where we are going here. Is society on the precipice of falling into the abyss of illusion? Whatever is applicable in the context of art is likely also for the rest of all works, creative or intellectual, by human beings. Whatever is the current trajectory in these matters does not stop at art. AI inevitably will consume in some form all disciplines and master them. Observing closely what happens to art could inform us as to the future of other human domains. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-art-challenges-meaning-in-a-world https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-art-challenges-meaning-in-a-w...
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Is it different than prior mis/disinformation or than addictive media like computer games? It's just a way to spin your wheels endlessly, in a way that satisfies some neural perception of activity. Play that game all night - you know the feeling, so intense and addictive as you are playing, and then in the morning the bizarre empty feeling that you are nowhere; you are living nowhere and have gotten nowhere. You feel sick or you are concerned about something, and you Google some mis/disinformation (who can tell the difference?) on someone's blog, Twitter, etc. Just like playing that game, while you're doing it you feel like you are doing something. But you are just as sick, your concern is unresolved (though with mis/disinfo, you don't always realize it). Now we have immersive 3D worlds and AI illusions to occupy us even better. Our technologists are innovating ways for us to go nowhere and stay nowhere ever better. Apple's choice to make their goggles transparent, with reality visible to the user and vice-versa (the user's eyes visible to others), is an interesting philosophical choice in this context. ... In fairness, it doesn't have to be nowhere. Art can be an alternate reality that is somewhere and gets us somewhere.
  - 13years 3y ago
    "Is it different than prior mis/disinformation or than addictive media like computer games?" Substantially so. Nothing prior became indistinguishable from reality. Yes, illusions have existed in some form, but they were still discernable with effort and good illusions had significant production cost. This massively scales up that capability, not in just production, but in the parameters of influence as well. It will be capable of understanding, predicting and influencing behavior far more precisely and deliberately. All the data exists for this and will be analyzed for such effect.
qingcharles 3y ago
Had to dig around to find this thing.. it's a Y Combinator pitch: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/can-of-soup https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/can-of-soup
- hfjjbf 3y ago
  [dead]
neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230929110452/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/technology/ai-images-social-media-sharing.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230929110452/https://www.nytime...
fooop 3y ago
ah yes. The solution for too much technology is obviously more technology. I'm so glad that we have all these smart people working for us.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  If we go fast enough, surely we'll fly instead of crash and burn!
carabiner 3y ago
OpenAI must be destroyed.
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  It's important to remember that technological advancement is inevitable
  - kibwen 3y ago
    The heat death of the universe is inevitable. From that perspective, technological advancement is highly evitable.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    if that were true we'd be running the world on nuclear fission there is such a thing as social pushback sinking a technology, see also google glass and maybe also LSD. advances to be sure, roundly rejected by polite society.
wolverine876 3y ago
On a tangential topic: > Myuri Thiruna, a freelance photographer in Toronto, used to post frequently on Instagram and discuss photography with other users. But she said she had stopped two years ago, feeling “drained” by the demands of social media and the pursuit of followers and trends. Don't we see this pattern by now? 'I was doing [fun/creative/innovative/passionate] work and then [0-3] years ago I felt [drained/depressed/despairing] and stopped. It's time to live again.
- Swizec 3y ago
  As a person with an audience – you get to a point where the audience feels like an insatiable beast that just wants wants wants and never gives back. Soon you feel like a monkey dancing for peanuts to a jeering crowd that will move on to the next monkey immediately when you stop. You are only as good as your last [new] piece of content. Social media has long since stopped being a bazaar of ideas and stimulating exchange. These days to most people it’s passive entertainment fueled by semi amateur creators. It’s no linger social media, now it’s social media. It's pretty draining if you’re on the creator side.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    And unless you possess an extraordinarily wide creative range, people will eventually get bored with your work. Note how most YouTube channels are only popular for a few years at most. You discover one, it's new and interesting, you watch, can't wait for the next post. After a while the videos start to run together, the next one seems the same as the previous one. You start to look around at what else seems interesting. And that creator falls back into obscurity.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing your experience with us. Is there another alternative between dancing monkey and despair? It seems like many rock'n'rollers settled on a more artistic approach, with some 'dancing' thrown in for fun. (Also, to be clear, I'm talking about a pattern that, IMHO, extends to every corner of society, from government leaders to non-profit leaders to artists to doctors to my friends and neighbors.)
romusha 3y ago
People buy this? Lol
Sol- 3y ago
I don't see how the headline is supported by the article's actual content. Seems like it should read "to boost engagement and user retention, social networks turn to AI gimmicks". I couldn't make out where the AI part helps with genuine human connection.

31 points by amichail 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gumballindie 3y ago

If anything, ai will alienate people from social networks. Fakery is already plenty, more will make alienation worse.

rightbyte 3y ago
Ye I happened to visit Reddit during the mod drama, and I noticed how all the bigger subs had this bot feeling to it. It was nothing like it used to feel when I used Reddit 10 years ago. It was like, as if 95% of the comments were from bots. Not the top voted ones, but the tail on those comments. And the bots seemed to just agree to whatever they were answering to with vague context feedback. The mix I anticipate is like every other user raging at every other user for being wrong, sorta.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Reddit has been not Reddit for a long time now. I still remember when the death of Fup, the store cat from Powell's Technical Books in Portland, OR, made the front page of Reddit. But both Reddit and Portland have long since been enshittified from how I remember them.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  I don't think it's bots, I see these sort of people in real life, it's most people in some circles. They are playing a little social game where you bet on a what a socially acceptable opinion is and if you guess right you get dopamine in the form of likes. This concensus seeking feedback loop results predictably in a hivemind.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Maybe, it is hard to prove the "dead internet theory". But I mean look at you. That is how it used to feel like on Reddit. Write stuff. Someone disagrees. Etc. Reddit gives me sect vibes nowadays.
    - hftthw 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Why not both? Because of Reddit's api changes it's harder to track this, but at one point it was pretty easy to find accounts that only posted comments that had already been posted in the past. Now, it's difficult to trace most comments under 7 or 8 words, but there were accounts that only had ever posted replies from other users. Just watching some threads in popular subs for replies that were exactly the same as others. Then trace both accounts. Sometimes one is a legitimate human, and one is a bot. Other times both accounts where pretty much every post in their account is something that had been previously posted.
    - lazystar 3y ago
      what if every post in the thread above me is from an ai bot... what if im the only human on hackernews? ive never met anyone irl whos been on this site. honk if youre human.
  - seneca 3y ago
    Yes, exactly this. It's a form of a Keynesian beauty contest. That essentially means to make your comment based not on what you think, but on what you think will be popular with others. It's the heart of modern social media. It abdicates opinion to the masses and drives the hive mind.
    - bitwize 3y ago
      It's called "social proof". You see this a lot in Japanese culture, it seems that all of Japan goes nuts for one thing or another that sweeps the entire nation like falling cherry blossoms in spring. When I was in Japan in 2011, young Japanese women were pretty eager to make smalltalk with me (most likely to practice their English, I'm not gonna lie about how much of a stud I am), and they tended to ask me similar smalltalky questions like "Who's your favorite musician?" I would try to explain as best I could who the KLF is, and then I would turn it around and ask "who's yours?" Every single girl had the exact same answer: Lady Gaga. Every. Single. Girl. Born This Way had just dropped in Japan, so there was a lot of promotion and Lady Gaga was everywhere in Japanese media, so Lady Gaga was the safe favorite artist to have at that moment in time; because everybody else apparently likes her, you won't be thought of as weird or an outcast for doing so, or be put in my unfortunate position of having to explain who the artist is and why their peculiar work is so captivating. That's social proof in a nutshell. Similar things that literally all of Japan was fond of at the time included One Piece (which is evergreen) and the cartoon character Stitch of Lilo & Stitch fame (an anime featuring him was running at the time). I saw Stitch and his girlfriend Angel crop up in some weird places, including on a poster in an elderly gentleman's ramen shop which was otherwise free of pop culture; just a grotty CRT TV with a Hanshin Tigers game on.
- hightrix 3y ago
  I noticed the exact same thing. In the midst of the protests, it felt like reddit turned on the "AI comment bots" and then just let them run. I rarely saw insightful comments or comments that aren't just repeated/reposted comments from the last time the link was posted. Reddit says "we did it" in response to the protest, but it really feels empty these last couple of months. This was almost as noticeable as during the 2016 election when the general sentiment of the site went from Pro-Sanders to Pro-Clinton, literally over night. The tinfoil hatters blame the Correct The Record group becoming active at that time. Along with the more recent changes of adding paid upvotes along with contributor rewards and then removing the ability to opt-out of ad-personalization, reddit management seems to have a one track mind. Profitability at the expense of anything, including the userbase.
qingcharles 3y ago
AI has changed the game for content uploaded to the Internet. I haven't seen an Asian girl in the last two years who doesn't run a filter on her images/videos 24x7. I know I try not to upload any images of myself that haven't at least been tweaked by AI, if nothing else than to improve the lighting etc. Shit, I even run my comments through ChatGPT before I post them if I feel like they could be improved. We're living in a strange time.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  This is wild to me. You could just not do though things and I genuinely believe the world will feel a bit less strange for you personally.
- coffeefirst 3y ago
  Honest question: why? I get color correction, but for the rest, what's the appeal?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Just trying to present my best self to the world. Online is like a whole separate personality for me, so it's like creating a character that I play.
    - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      But what if those worlds collide sometimes? I’m thinking specifically about (overly) enhanced photos of yourself.
      - qingcharles 3y ago
        They're never overly enhanced. I would bet 99.9% of people who see them just think "damn, this guy is good at taking photos" and don't guess I tweaked them.
        3y ago

jasonsb 3y ago

Social media as we knew it 10 years ago is dead and nothing will bring it back. OK, maybe "nothing" is an exaggeration, but we can safely exclude AI. AI will not bring back anything related to social networks.

XorNot 3y ago
I would argue social media started dying all on its own anyway: I remember the novelty of Facebook wearing off quickly when the most active subset of people on it all decided to just use it to cross post self promotion about their careers, and I had the "right, I don't actually care about people I went to high school with at all" moment.
barrenko 3y ago
Media itself might be dead.
- garba_dlm 3y ago
  nah, but the way in which ownership over media works right now (20th century style) cannot hold. media itself will adapt, change, morph or something
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Eh, media dying would probably be better for us... current evolution of media isn't taking it towards a destination where it's beneficial to the user. Much like the morphing of staph into MSRA.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
benreesman 3y ago
Social media companies have the most defensible datasets with actual longitudinal human behavior. If you want some big graph attention mechanism to know if people are going to get divorced? Just to pick an example. AI will bring back the IP trench warfare about the “graph”, twist: they don’t care if it gets updated.

13years 3y ago

This works as a novelty for a moment's interest. However, it quickly fades as AI is making authenticity a crisis of meaning. The new Meta announcements are bringing a flood of new gimmickery to the social platforms. More fake realities. I'm not sure where all this leads society, but I used AI art as a launch into deeper introspection of where we are going here. Is society on the precipice of falling into the abyss of illusion? Whatever is applicable in the context of art is likely also for the rest of all works, creative or intellectual, by human beings. Whatever is the current trajectory in these matters does not stop at art. AI inevitably will consume in some form all disciplines and master them. Observing closely what happens to art could inform us as to the future of other human domains. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-art-challenges-meaning-in-a-world https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-art-challenges-meaning-in-a-w...

wolverine876 3y ago
Is it different than prior mis/disinformation or than addictive media like computer games? It's just a way to spin your wheels endlessly, in a way that satisfies some neural perception of activity. Play that game all night - you know the feeling, so intense and addictive as you are playing, and then in the morning the bizarre empty feeling that you are nowhere; you are living nowhere and have gotten nowhere. You feel sick or you are concerned about something, and you Google some mis/disinformation (who can tell the difference?) on someone's blog, Twitter, etc. Just like playing that game, while you're doing it you feel like you are doing something. But you are just as sick, your concern is unresolved (though with mis/disinfo, you don't always realize it). Now we have immersive 3D worlds and AI illusions to occupy us even better. Our technologists are innovating ways for us to go nowhere and stay nowhere ever better. Apple's choice to make their goggles transparent, with reality visible to the user and vice-versa (the user's eyes visible to others), is an interesting philosophical choice in this context. ... In fairness, it doesn't have to be nowhere. Art can be an alternate reality that is somewhere and gets us somewhere.
- 13years 3y ago
  "Is it different than prior mis/disinformation or than addictive media like computer games?" Substantially so. Nothing prior became indistinguishable from reality. Yes, illusions have existed in some form, but they were still discernable with effort and good illusions had significant production cost. This massively scales up that capability, not in just production, but in the parameters of influence as well. It will be capable of understanding, predicting and influencing behavior far more precisely and deliberately. All the data exists for this and will be analyzed for such effect.

qingcharles 3y ago

Had to dig around to find this thing.. it's a Y Combinator pitch: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/can-of-soup https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/can-of-soup

hfjjbf 3y ago
[dead]

neonate 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230929110452/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/technology/ai-images-social-media-sharing.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230929110452/https://www.nytime...

fooop 3y ago

ah yes. The solution for too much technology is obviously more technology. I'm so glad that we have all these smart people working for us.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
If we go fast enough, surely we'll fly instead of crash and burn!

carabiner 3y ago

OpenAI must be destroyed.

jimmaswell 3y ago
It's important to remember that technological advancement is inevitable
- kibwen 3y ago
  The heat death of the universe is inevitable. From that perspective, technological advancement is highly evitable.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  if that were true we'd be running the world on nuclear fission there is such a thing as social pushback sinking a technology, see also google glass and maybe also LSD. advances to be sure, roundly rejected by polite society.

wolverine876 3y ago

On a tangential topic: > Myuri Thiruna, a freelance photographer in Toronto, used to post frequently on Instagram and discuss photography with other users. But she said she had stopped two years ago, feeling “drained” by the demands of social media and the pursuit of followers and trends. Don't we see this pattern by now? 'I was doing [fun/creative/innovative/passionate] work and then [0-3] years ago I felt [drained/depressed/despairing] and stopped. It's time to live again.

Swizec 3y ago
As a person with an audience – you get to a point where the audience feels like an insatiable beast that just wants wants wants and never gives back. Soon you feel like a monkey dancing for peanuts to a jeering crowd that will move on to the next monkey immediately when you stop. You are only as good as your last [new] piece of content. Social media has long since stopped being a bazaar of ideas and stimulating exchange. These days to most people it’s passive entertainment fueled by semi amateur creators. It’s no linger social media, now it’s social media. It's pretty draining if you’re on the creator side.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  And unless you possess an extraordinarily wide creative range, people will eventually get bored with your work. Note how most YouTube channels are only popular for a few years at most. You discover one, it's new and interesting, you watch, can't wait for the next post. After a while the videos start to run together, the next one seems the same as the previous one. You start to look around at what else seems interesting. And that creator falls back into obscurity.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience with us. Is there another alternative between dancing monkey and despair? It seems like many rock'n'rollers settled on a more artistic approach, with some 'dancing' thrown in for fun. (Also, to be clear, I'm talking about a pattern that, IMHO, extends to every corner of society, from government leaders to non-profit leaders to artists to doctors to my friends and neighbors.)

romusha 3y ago

People buy this? Lol

Sol- 3y ago

I don't see how the headline is supported by the article's actual content. Seems like it should read "to boost engagement and user retention, social networks turn to AI gimmicks". I couldn't make out where the AI part helps with genuine human connection.