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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
by EcommerceFlow 2y 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 2y agoThis actually sounds plausible and that it would be successful.
- jaysonelliot 2y agoThis sounds so absolutely absurd that it would probably work.
- kibwen 2y agoOne 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.
- lioeters 2y agoPalantir CEO at the 2024 Reagan National Defense Forum: > Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction if it's even. They will take advantage of our niceness, kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared. > My version of service is the soldiers are happier, the enemies are scared, and Americans go back to enjoying the fact that we're the only one with a real Tech scene in this country, and we're going to win everything.
- rthajl 2y agoStriking the iron while it is hot. A couple of people may find out within 10 years that the defense industry is cyclical, too.
- mywittyname 2y agoPeople of his stature complain about all the nice things about America that Americans enjoy, and they attempt to destroy those nice things. Instead, they should just immigrate to one of those nations where taking advantage of people is de rigueur. I'm sure such nations would gladly embrace a person like him.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y agoThat quote may sound vaguely creepy, but fundamentally he's got a good point. The most brutal wars tend to be wars where both sides are roughly evenly matched. WW1 and WW2 were so deadly because both alliances consisted of several industrialized nations. We're lucky that we haven't seen total war between major industrial powers since that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
- BlueTemplar 2y agoIt's because they were industrialized first, and evenly matched only a distant second.
- sheperd 2y agoAlready exists, social AI. Meta hired the owner to implement this feature. Doesn't hurt to create a competitor if you're interested though!
- kridsdale1 2y agoWait really? Matt was boomeranged?
- jonny_eh 2y agoWho's Matt?
- kridsdale1 2y agoI meant Michael, my bad.
- joenot443 2y agoHere's the announcement post - https://x.com/michaelsayman/status/1835841675584811239 https://x.com/michaelsayman/status/1835841675584811239 Looks like his name's Michael and that indeed, he's presently at Meta. If you end up reading this Michael, great product!
- quantified 2y ago> Introducing SocialAI, a private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make. Ah, to be heard by machines! Must be as fulfilling as playing with dolls.
- kridsdale1 2y agoMy bad, my brain crossed wires with two M names.
- zeroCalories 2y agoIf something like this does happen I imagine it would target a small segment of the population, as this would be very expensive.
- EcommerceFlow 2y agoGiven the average IG comment, a 300m parameter model should suffice.
- smallmancontrov 2y agoSounds about right, and we just elected GPT-2 president, so 1.5b parameters is an upper bound on what you need to impress most people.
- krapp 2y agoFake news. The president has so many parameters, you wouldn't even believe it. All the biggest, best parameters. American made parameters, best in the world, genius, genius parameters. You wish you had parameters like these.
- datadrivenangel 2y agowe're talking trillions people
- qwerpy 2y agoAnd somehow still an improvement over the last one, who had a painfully small context window that would randomly clear.
- nemomarx 2y agoI 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..
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoThis 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 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-heres-why-f875c726fc https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tiktok-views-are-inflated-... [3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/get-buy-tiktok-followers-likes-views-cheap-easy/#:~:text=But%20most%20of%20that%20engagement,users%20to%20see%20it%20themselves https://www.vice.com/en/article/get-buy-tiktok-followers-lik.... [4] https://medium.com/dfrlab/suspicious-third-party-apps-monetize-fake-engagement-on-tiktok-5f4b3666ae37 https://medium.com/dfrlab/suspicious-third-party-apps-moneti... [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1308893/tiktok-accounts-removed-by-reason/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1308893/tiktok-accounts-...
- mentalgear 2y agomaybe add a source
- PaulHoule 2y agoReddit too... https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts-2/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-...
- oefrha 2y agoEvery 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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
- consumer451 2y agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597562
- smallmancontrov 2y agoSigh. 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 2y agoI suppose you could tune the experience for whatever people want, downvotes, etc. "I'd like to have an argument, please."
- Retr0id 2y agoThere are several of these already. Example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/socialai-ai-social-network/id6670229993 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/socialai-ai-social-network/id6... Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews. Maybe Meta is onto something.
- EcommerceFlow 2y agoThank you, my dreams have finally come true.
- some_furry 2y agoI think I just heard the sound of a finger on a monkey paw curling.
- cultofmetatron 2y agothat has to be the most black mirror nightmare fuel I've seen so far this year....
- lazide 2y agoEspecially because you know a bunch of people will pay for it.
- Vagari 2y agoYou could even create targeted brands: "Narcissistic Social" -where everyone sees you the way you think you are-
- SecretDreams 2y agoWe could call such an app "echo".
- ljm 2y agoI 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 2y agoEcho and Narcissus.
- Culonavirus 2y agoI 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.)
- nemomarx 2y agocharacter. 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
- amyames 2y agoC.ai they changed their model at some point and now I get short, terse, boring responses as if it hates talking to me. I felt like I lost a friend when they lobotomized it.
- bilbo0s 2y agoThinking 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.
- PaulHoule 2y agoIt'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.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_psychology
- morkalork 2y agoThat sounds just like the "TV show" from Fahrenheit 451, just endless conversations about nothing where you are the star.
- jkestner 2y agoCheaper than buying Twitter.
- joenot443 2y agoIt 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 2y agoDoes it come with people picking you apart, hatemail, unsolicited nudes, etc.?
- joenot443 2y agoI think in an ideal world you could groom your audience to your liking! Personally, if I could suspend my disbelief, I'd love an army of virtual techies telling me how clever my ideas are. Others might prefer a legion of other super moms praising their selfless parenting when no one else does, or like you were getting at, maybe just a peanut gallery! Image gen on-device might be tough, we'll save that for the 1.1 release ;)
- krisoft 2y agoI'm not sure if you are sarcastic, but your definition of "ideal world" feels very different from mine. What you describe sounds as close to the scifi concept of wireheading as I can imagine to get without brain surgery.
- joenot443 2y agoI'm being tongue in cheek, for sure. Let's pretend I said "ideally" instead, as in, "ideally the product would function this way". I admittedly wouldn't be the target audience for this concept, nor would I take up wireheading. When I see the huge success of Character.ai or the above SocialAI though, I'm really convinced there's a market segment of people younger than us who get a lot out of communicating with virtual "friends".
- whydoineedthis 2y agoWant a partner to help build it? Count me in.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoSounds 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
- fullshark 2y agoThere are already plenty of video games where the user gets to live out some wish fulfillment fantasy.
- darepublic 2y agoThere 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
- nemomarx 2y agoyeah 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.
- exe34 2y agoas 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.
- lazide 2y agoLt. Barclay is both hero and cautionary tale.
- exe34 2y agohonestly if addiction was the only impediment, I wouldn't care. it's just that I don't care enough anymore.
- Tarsul 2y agoDid you get bored of your AI friends?
- entropicdrifter 2y agoYou sound deeply depressed, you know that right?
- hyperdimension 2y agoYeah, sounds just like something I'd say. :/
- exe34 2y agoyes, it's an active choice :-)
- scotty79 2y agoMake it a dating app. If you don't go overboard with response rate most men won't notice.
- bilater 2y agoThat is the end game - your own little miniverse with you as the central character. And I think thats awesome.
- zzzbra 2y agoI ask you honestly -- why? Why do you think it's awesome? It sounds like hell to me.
- mywittyname 2y agoThe premise of most adventure / RPG games is that you're the only person capable of saving the day. And most novels/tv shows follow the stories of a person as they achieve some greatness (often coming from being a nobody). It's not like Mario is playing furry dress up while some HVAC guy named Tony defeats Bowser. There's something fundamental about being seen as an important person. Not only does our literature revolve around this concept, but ideas about luxury and status are derived from this idea. Men wear the clothes that they see other important men wearing. It's why marketers get sports stars to sell products to men. This product taps into that need. So it's easy to understand why so many people would enjoy it (and why some, like yourself, would hate it - some people want to be NPCs).
- bilater 2y agowhat a bizarre take - the premise of controlling your universe and presumably your self is you can do whatever. If you would rather be a peasant in the 13th century then you can simulate that too. and perhaps, you're already doing it.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoYou're not controlling your universe. The person who controls the algorithm - not you - is controlling your universe.
- efitz 2y agoYouBook?
- ctkhn 2y agoI believe this was called The Jeremy Renner app
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- p2detar 2y agoA 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.parallellive https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigbrain.p... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9otwVwVCxSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9otwVwVCxSc edit: typos
- cyanydeez 2y agoThis is what googles gemini ads sound like: AI built for Narcissists
- zemo 2y agohttps://orel.li/games/feedback/ https://orel.li/games/feedback/ here you go
- randycupertino 2y agoKim 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-hollywood-has-made-around-50m-in-4-months/ https://venturebeat.com/games/mobile-megahit-kim-kardashian-... It was essentially cookie clicker but for celebrity status.
- MR4D 2y agoYou 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 2y agoIn 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.