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Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles

• arresin 2y ago
  > Instagram profile of ‘proud Black queer momma’, created by Meta, said her development team included no Black people It’s such a weird religion.
  • smegger001 2y ago
    it raises several questions, my first question (besides the obvious question of why is this a thing at all) is does the chatbot actually have the information about the racial background of its dev team or is it hallucinating up an answer when it lacks the data. if it does have that sort of knowledge why personally identifiable information about individual devs accessable to a public facing chatbot and how much of their HR file can be exfitraited via chatbot to anyone that asks it questions, if it doesn't have this information and it just assumes its devs are all white what does that say about the information its trained on
    • xncuvyv6 2y ago
      [dead]
    • ncr100 2y ago
      Hallucination. An issue we care about and it just answers regardless of accuracy. Boo.
      • brookst 2y ago
        So you fact checked this comment before posting, right? Because I am deeply interested if this was hallucination or used RAG and web search to provide the answer, but I can’t tell if you just chose to hallucinate without grounding.
        • throwaway314155 2y ago
          > hallucination or used RAG and web search to provide the answer Occam's razor - it was an hallucination.
        • Rastonbury 2y ago
          Come on why would anyone put the team's races into RAG or anywhere under the hood lol
          • brookst 2y ago
            Does it seem outlandish that there might have been a press article about the team?
            • Rastonbury 2y ago
              When's the last time you saw an article with entire team responsible with gender and race for a non-flagship product at a company the size of Meta? Even if the article existed, getting the right article (instead of simply using the first Bing result, which is what the other Meta AI does) and the reasoning in a one shot instant response is better COT models like o1 If you have Messenger, try asking it to list the team behind them or their Tom Brady bot, it will not get far
    • noirbot 2y ago
      It's Meta, so this is almost definitely some Llama variant under the hood, especially since these bots have been out for a year, evidently. It seems these were just insanely poorly trained and gated - getting a bot to comment on its dev team, including in some cases specific names of lead designers, is something that feels crazy to let a bot just do. Even if all the data it would respond with is made up slop, this exact debacle is why you do your best to make a bot not even try to answer this sort of stuff. As for what information it was trained on that it said its dev team had no black devs, that seems fairly reasonable based on general statistical information and scholarly articles it was trained on. It may still be incorrect, but that's a pretty statistically likely outcome, so it's not surprising an LLM built to parrot the statistically likely outcome would say it.
  • labster 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • lolmaga 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • noirbot 2y ago
    Religion? Isn't the weirdness here that someone at Meta seems to have decided that they should make an AI bot that proudly announced its identity, despite literally not being proud, queer, black, or a mother? Who does this serve? Why? I could see a bot that's into fitness or some other hobby having a niche as a wrapper around an AI meant for advice on the hobby, but there's a certain crazy hubris to going "this LLM can really speak as a member of an identity group".
    • dingnuts 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • martythemaniak 2y ago
        Surely you're aware of all the proud red hats out there. Maybe Trump won because he's really good at this religion?
        • TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
          This is a huge nitpick, but I’d argue that Trumpism is a cult. Religions typically have a sacrosanct (if slowly evolving) set of principals that are more-or-less related and internally consistent. “Murder is bad. The Golden Rule.” Trump and the nut jobs that believe in him are engaged in cultism. The direction of the day is whichever way the wind is blowing in his favor, yesterday’s perspectives be damned.
    • alephxyz 2y ago
      It's performative art. A critique of social constructionism by taking to its extreme.
    • manishader 2y ago
      Our language really needs a new word for what is meant here by "religion". The word "religion" brings so much baggage with it that it just causes a cascade of communication errors in this context. Pareto when translated from Italian to English called this "non-logical conduct" and "sentiments" but after a 100 years no one seems to care much about this aspect of Pareto's thoughts. Sentiments would be a great word for it though instead of "religion". Woke sentiments instead of "woke religion". The concept of identity sentiments might even be a little bit of progress.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• Trasmatta 2y ago
  > Conversations with the characters quickly went sideways when some users peppered them with questions including who created and developed the AI. Liv, for instance, said that her creator team included zero Black people and was predominantly white and male. It was a “pretty glaring omission given my identity”, the bot wrote in response to a question from the Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah. This is probably true, but the AI almost certainly hallucinated these facts.
  • az226 2y ago
    For sure.
  • AIFounder 2y ago
    [dead]
  • elphinstone 2y ago
    A woke bot from a woke workforce unintentionally created a parody of wokeness. Keep 'em coming.
  • hopfenspergerj 2y ago
    If you’re meta and you have to defend the AI by admitting “it’s not really intelligent and everything it says is bullshit”, that’s not a position of strength.
    • notahacker 2y ago
      Particularly when it's likely that despite the AI bullshitting in the absence of data on its creators, it's also incidentally true that the "black queer momma" persona is a few lines of behavioural stereotypes composed by white male programmers without any particular experience of black queer mommas.
      • thwarted 2y ago
        If the intent is to make a recognizable caricature and apply labels to it (cough stereotype), you don't have someone draw themselves. And it's really looking like stereotyping is their intent.
• NotYourLawyer 2y ago
  Who thought this was ever a good idea?
  • fullshark 2y ago
    If you are going to build a series of anthropomorphized chat bots, what are you going to do, NOT build a proud black queer mama that underserved users can connect with? Sounds racist/homophobic to do that, hence you must build chatbots for a wide swathe of the world ---> Voila.
    • NotYourLawyer 2y ago
      QED
  • drdaeman 2y ago
    A lot of people, apparently. After LLMs became capable of producing believably meaningful fiction texts, roleplay was one obvious use case, and a lot of people have fun with it. (Of course, some are weird and get attached to their own generated fiction.) If we'd ignore all the US-specific craze (e.g. mentally replace "black queer" with something that doesn't trigger people, like, idk, "space unicorn"), this is really just another RP chatbot thing.
  • andrepd 2y ago
    It is a good idea, just not for you or your best interests.
  • s1artibartfast 2y ago
    What's the difference? Most influencers were fake people already. They were just meat and silicone instead of silicon
    • Xplune13 2y ago
      Great! So on top of that, let's create more fake people! Sounds like a good idea.
• naming_the_user 2y ago
  > Those AI profiles included Liv, whose profile described her as a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller” I find this stuff absolutely fascinating, that even an AI bot tries to do this sort of thing. It just strikes me that there is no world in which racism will ever die out as long as things like this are happening. You can't have it both ways. If race is just melanin content then we have no issue. That's the win case. If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.
  • kmonsen 2y ago
    Race is clearly cultural in todays society because we can make it so. Very unlikely to be genetically culturally if that is what you are saying (but of course, who knows).
    • naming_the_user 2y ago
      What I'm saying is that it the AI to me illustrates how much of a self-own drawing these cultural battle lines is. If you choose to describe yourself by the colour of your skin first and foremost then you're telling everyone that you think that's relevant information which is, well.. the entire problem - you're telling everyone around you that you think it has predictive power. But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.
      • Carrok 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • naming_the_user 2y ago
          DWB exists because people (police in this case) think skin colour has predictive power. It's the same thing. (I'm not saying that it's a good thing, responders seem to be assuming that). Meh, whatever, one day maybe we'll be able to have sane discussions about this. Probably not.
• davidw 2y ago
  The thread is here and... it's pretty wild. This doesn't seem like it was a well-thought out idea to release this without some more consideration beforehand. https://bsky.app/profile/karenattiah.bsky.social/post/3letty2t4ik2c https://bsky.app/profile/karenattiah.bsky.social/post/3letty...
  • Trasmatta 2y ago
    > They admitted it internally, to me It's becoming an increasingly apparent problem that people don't understand that LLMs frequently hallucinate, especially when asked to introspect about themselves. This was 100% a hallucination.
    • davidw 2y ago
      "I know, let's release an AI bot that pretends to be something that's likely to be viewed through a charged political lense and have it hallucinate random answers to people"
    • asveikau 2y ago
      It's getting weird that people cite ChatGPT to settle debates. Even on places like HN where supposedly people have a technical background and know they shouldn't blindly trust an LLM as a source of truth. Even with the banners it has warning about this.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
        Technical knowledge and wisdom are two very different things. There is an excess of the former here, on this site, in this field, but a comical dearth of the latter.
        • MrMcCall 2y ago
          I have but one upvote to give you, good sir/madam, when I wish I had 100.
• gregmullin 2y ago
  This reads like a satire article, ain't no way this is real journalism. Im unsure if you can draw a line asking AI legitimate questions.
  • noirbot 2y ago
    I mean, even if the bot's responses aren't correct, the fact that Meta did this at all and it was out there answering these questions with total garbage is also a total story. I'm not seeing Meta responding with "actually we did have a team of black queer mothers working on this".
• guywithahat 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • davidw 2y ago
    > insufficiently political (ie saying her programming wasn’t done by black females). If you're trying to create a persona, having someone that knows about the background said persona would likely have is not political, it's just common sense. It's like having a group of people from Brazil design outdoor clothing for Norwegians or something along those lines. Now, who knows how much the responses were hallucinated or not, but the whole thing is just weird and seems poorly thought out.
    • AdrianB1 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • polytely 2y ago
        We all do know that doctors do have to go through a whole residency phase in their training where they spend a lot of time with sick people and work under the supervision of more experienced doctors, gaining personal experience with the field. I think first-hand experience matters quite a bit, actually.
        • AdrianB1 2y ago
          You just confirmed that you don't need to be a powerful black woman to program an AI bot pretending to be one, you can be a green Martian dwarf with the right skills and knowledge. Residency brings knowledge about sick people, being sick is not a requirement.
  • noirbot 2y ago
    That seems to miss the point. The bot is likely correct in that its development team didn't align with its identity. If anything, it lived up to its training in essentially calling out its own oddity in the way that black and queer people online did when they found out about it. Having it lie about its dev team certainly wouldn't have helped in this case. The issue is Meta making a bot to essentially masquerade as an identity group at all.
• drivingmenuts 2y ago
  I don't know whether to be amused or furious. They're trying to create personal social interaction with a non-person without real intelligence, conscience or morals. So they can fool people into emotional attachments and learn more about how to sell things to us. Goddamnit. I kinda feel that should be not only illegal, but just short of a capitol crime.
  • attila-lendvai 2y ago
    if only it was about selling stuff...! although, if you mean it broadly; i.e. selling wars, selling the idea of fiat money, or taxation, or national debt, or the plandemonium... then i hear you.
    • Biganon 2y ago
      What's your alternative to taxation?...
  • pvaldes 2y ago
    > They're trying to create personal social interaction with a non-person without real intelligence, conscience or morals. So, they rediscovered Internet trolls?
  • CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    Only if by "just short" you mean they get life without possibility of parole or pardon in max security and never see another screen as long as they live.
• mrayycombi 2y ago
  [flagged]
• qntmfred 2y ago
  I get the hate, but I'd be open to trying out a social media experience that is a mix of human and bots, especially as the bots get better at acting like reasonable humans. Stack Overflow was great when it came out. But the whatever percent of humans who were mean and obnoxious and wouldn't let you just ask your questions eventually ruined it all. Then ChatGPT came out without any humans to get in the way of me asking my software development questions, and it was so much better. In the same way, when social media came out, it was great. But the whatever percent of humans who were mean and obnoxious and wouldn't let you just socialize and speak your mind eventually ruined it all. If there's an equivalent social media experience out there that gets rid of or at least mitigates the horriblenesses of humanity while still letting people socialize online and explore what's on their mind, maybe it's worth trying.
  • rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
    I can’t think of any way where a social media app using bots to discourage wrongthink doesn’t come across as dystopian, and also a little sad.
    • brookst 2y ago
      All “wrongthink”? Like if someone expresses suicidal thoughts, the bot should say “whatever, do what you want”? I disagree. Apps are products with an editorial component. Editorials should be opinionated. It is passive and immature to simply not care how one’s products are used. Oppenheimer and Alfred Nobel have wise words on this topic.
      • NBJack 2y ago
        Why settle for indifference to self-harm? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-chatbot-threatening-message-human-please-die/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-chatbot-threatening-m...
    • PartiallyTyped 2y ago
      I feel that these days "wrongthink" is a dogwhistle, by all means, just use X or pravda social.
• xracy 2y ago
  I feel like the question I want to ask is "Why do we need AI-Profiles?" Like, I can barely be bothered to keep in touch with my friends and family. Why do I need a fake person to be follow on social media? What purpose does it serve? What possibly comes out of this that is positive?
  • xigoi 2y ago
    So that you get attached to a person who only exists on Facebook, therefore you spend more time on Facebook and see more ads.
  • add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    You're right, it's not meant to be a positive outcome for you. It's meant to keep people on Facebook longer so more ad impressions can be delivered. In this case, eventually, conversationally.
  • andrepd 2y ago
    Half of Internet traffic is bots. Half of webpages are written by bots. It's just the logical conclusion.
  • kraftman 2y ago
    Its the other way around. It's about giving people the attention they need exactly because they dont keep in touch any more, so they have a reason to come back to the platform.
    • jazzyjackson 2y ago
      Quite a long ways from "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together", unless you consider homogenizing behavior through interacting with a borgbot "bringing us closer together"
  • quest88 2y ago
    Unlimited content without needing to pay out humans in rev share.
• rsynnott 2y ago
  Do they not have anyone sensible left in the room? Like, you’d expect that at some point someone would have said ‘these are comically terrible, we cannot allow them to see the light of day’.
  • motohagiography 2y ago
    It's like people have already forgotten why people used the non-human beings in Westworld. One of the first things we're going to use them for is amusement and having them represent anything sentimental or sensitive is going to make them a target like this. It was irresponsible. There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'd argue it's because the honest human desire that drives a product dies or is refined out of initiatives by the time it gets through the optimization process of their org structure. Nothing is going to survive there unless it's an arbitrage or using leverage on the user, and the things that survive are uncanny and weird because they are no longer expressions of something someone wants. These avatars ticked all the boxes, but when they arrived, people laughed at them because objectively they were bureaucratic abominations.
    • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      > There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. Because AI is the hype thing and adding AI to your thing makes the stock price go up, because investors and stock evaluators don't know what AI is, nor do they care. They just know it's the hot thing and what you put in your product to make it look better to Wall St. Meta AI, Google AI summaries, Apple Intelligence are all hilariously half-baked features designed to connect users with ChatGPT so the line goes brrrrrrr. Them being helpful, useful products that solve problems for users is a distant, distant next place to that.
    • bloomingkales 2y ago
      I think Google and others are too distracted in collecting enterprise coin at the moment. They have a perfectly good consumer product in NotebookLM, but at the moment it has the quality of something an intern made.
• belter 2y ago
  If you accepted digital tokens as ‘money’, don't be surprised to have AI faces as friends...
  • freedomben 2y ago
    Money is whatever people agree it is. Printed pieces of paper or recorded bits in a database are no more inherently valuable than digital tokens, yet everyone accepts them as "money". AI faces are no surprise, but I fail to see the connection you are going for.
    • asdff 2y ago
      Because the government backs the dollar. The government doesn’t back runescape gp for instance. It has value yes but its also not money. Otherwise anything one could trade could count as money. I traded my couch for beer now its money if we only defined money by having some value and ability to trade it.
      • 13415 2y ago
        > Otherwise anything one could trade could count as money. But that's correct and often occurs on black markets for all kinds of reasons, for example coffee and cigarettes in Germany after WW2 and Hungarian salami and tires in the GDR. There are no alternative currencies because they are strictly prohibited by penal law, otherwise they would occur in all kinds of areas. Governments only allow highly regulated alternative currencies, and even then only under very rare circumstances. Crypto coins weren't an exception to this, they only emerged a bit faster than how legislation could be updated.
      • int_19h 2y ago
        Money predates governments.
• lionkor 2y ago
  I don't like that some people, esp at larger companies, think that groups with disadvantages in today's world are cutesy adorable things to play make-believe with.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • MrMcCall 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    that’s basically our entire culture. ever notice how black people are disproportionately represented in comic media and particularly “reaction gifs”? just modern day ministrelism
    • ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
      > ever notice how black people are disproportionately represented in comic media and particularly “reaction gifs”? No, I have never noticed that. In fact, I have noticed the opposite.
      • whimsicalism 2y ago
        the comedy thing is maybe debatable but the reaction gifs thing is objectively true and kinda weird from my perspective
        • cootsnuck 2y ago
          Yea, I don't know how anyone could even pretend to not notice the reaction gifs. It's been like that since reaction gifs have been a thing.
        • ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
          Are you sure it's objectively true, and not just a personal observation based on subjective experience? Given that we have had opposite experiences, it seems like the latter. Maybe the crowds you run with disproportionately use them?
• brianbest101 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• NicholasGurr 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 2y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • NicholasGurr 2y ago
      [dead]
• Eumenes 2y ago
  Good, these things are for dumb people anyways. Don't worry tho, they'll be back and more convincing.
  • MrMcCall 2y ago
    By the stupid, for the stupid.
• ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Knowing Facebook this just means that's what they want publicly to be known, but they are probably starting an intensive new program without labeling these things as AI and trying to hide it.
  • KaiserPro 2y ago
    > Knowing Facebook this just means that's what they want publicly to be known You're assuming that Facebook has a plan. Which is at best, generous. They are a bunch of overly active hall monitors with an incentives package that encourages people to "create impact" by increasing arbitrary metrics. At no point do they ask "is this good for the product/user" they ask "will this improve metric x,y or z" These profiles come from the GenAI team, or worse, a competing team inside instagram (who are doing this so that they can then move to the better-chance -of-getting-promoted org that is GenAI) for some experiment where they prove that some metric improves, and doesn't lower another metric, if you shove AI onto the public.
• cdcox 2y ago
  This was probably an okay idea terribly implemented. GenAI creators on social media kind of sense. Neurosama, an AI streamer, is massively popular. Silllytavern which lets people make and chat with characters or tell stories with LLMs feeds Openrouter 20 million messages a day, which is a fraction of it's totally usage. Anecdotally I've have non tech friends learn how to install Git and work an API to get this one working. There are unfortunately tons of secretly AI made influencers on Instagram. When Meta started these profiles in 2023 it was less clear how the technologies were going to be used and most were just celeb licensed. I think a few things went wrong. The biggest is GenAI has the highest value in narrowcast and the lowest value in broadcast. GenAI can do very specific and creative things for an individual but when spread to everyone or used with generic prompts it start averaging and becomes boring. It's like Google showing its top searches: it's always going to just be for webpages. Making an GenAI profile isn't fun because these AIs don't really do interesting things on their own. I chatted with these they had very little memory and almost no willingness to do interesting things. Second, mega corps are, for better or worse, too risk averse to make these any fun. GenAI is most wild and interesting when it can run on its own or do unhinged things. There are several people on Twitter who have ongoing LLM chat rooms that get extremely weird and fascinating but in a way a tech company would never allow. Silllytavern is most interesting/human when the LLM takes things off the rails and challenges or threatens the user. One of the biggest news stories of 2023 was an LLM telling a journalist it loved him. But Meta was never going to make a GenAI that would do self-looping art or have interesting conversations. These LLMs probably are guardrailed into the ground and probably also have watcher models on them. You can almost feel that safeness and lack of risk taking in the boringness of the profiles if you look up the ones they set up in 2023. Football person, comedy person, fashion person, all geared to advice and stuff safe and boring. I suspect these things had almost zero engagement and they had shuttered most of them. I wonder what Meta was planning with the new ones they were going to roll out.
  • Macha 2y ago
    > Neurosama, an AI streamer, is massively popular. I think some level of Neuro's popularity is due to the Vedal + Neuro double act though, and some of the scripted/prepared replies.
• mentos 2y ago
  I always thought AI would need a physical form before it really started competing with humans but now this thought exercise made me realize that with so much of life lived/worked virtually that reality is so much closer than we realize.
• tomalaci 2y ago
  You know what AI profiles I want more of? Clueless grandma/grandpa that accepts scammer calls and waste their time. Such as UK's O2 Daisy: https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/o2-unveils-daisy-the-ai-granny-wasting-scammers-time/ https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/o2-unveils-daisy-the-ai-gra...
  • cute_boi 2y ago
    Imagine AI calling AI and wasting each others time :D
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • pkkkzip 2y ago
      This is actually a hilarious scenario. Anthropomorphize TTS with Indian accents to entrap the other AI agent into thinking they are a real human. DDOS their o1 API calls by soft jail breaking prompts using complex programming questions disguised as typical Microsoft support issues. CodeBot: Word tables blank sometimes. Hmm. SupportBot: What version? Try a repair. CodeBot: Memory issue maybe? Bad alloc? SupportBot: Rare. Repair is next. CodeBot: Threading problem sar? Data races? SupportBot: Try repair, new doc please sar.
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        ScamVictimBot: sound = tts("Say again?") // constant, might as well cache while(true): phone.out(sound) _ = phone.waitUntilNextPause()
    • drdrey 2y ago
      really wasting each other’s energy
      • cratermoon 2y ago
        really wasting humanity's energy and the planet's climate
• red_admiral 2y ago
  The irony here is that there have been commercial social media bot services since before the current GPT/LLM/AI wave, and they're better at it than both meta and its AI can manage.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  My friend recently showed me what instagram is currently like as I’ve been off of it for years. It’s honestly so enshittified now! Like he just kept scrolling and there 0 posts from friends - just influencers, brain rot and ads.
  • mentos 2y ago
    Might be a good name for a competing service. “Get BrainRot on the iOS and Android app stores and start feeling important today!”
  • asdff 2y ago
    Same issue with fb where over time all your friends stop posting after they got busy after highschool. Most I get is a birth announcement or wedding photo on instagram from actual people and that’s not exactly a daily post for anyone. But at the same time people don’t mind its current state. I don’t mind its current state. When I open instagram I get nonstop reels of people doing backflips on skis. I’ve honed my feed as such by only engaging (well, watching and not scrolling away) with those posts really. It is a much better experience than trying to find ski videos on youtube as I don’t need to hunt for the key clip, editing is pretty tight on instagram, and also no ads or other bullshit you get watching things on youtube.
  • woutr_be 2y ago
    I know it won’t be popular, but I would honestly love to have a social network that’s purely just what my friends/family post. No suggested content, no algorithmic feed, no reacting to posts. Just purely whatever they post and ability to leave a comment.
    • chikere232 2y ago
      That is very doable as a groupchat or a private mastodon or lemmy instance. Invite your family and friends, don't federate with the wider fediverse.
• ProAm 2y ago
  What happened to the Metaverse? Not snarky, but it also seems like it has been killed off in favor of AI investments?
  • cmckn 2y ago
    It seems to still exist, to the extent that it ever existed: https://horizon.meta.com/ https://horizon.meta.com/
  • Tier3r 2y ago
    The feeling I'm getting is management took such a huge stance (the capex, the name change, etc) on it it'd be humiliating to turn 180 and ditch it now (they've spent 50 billion on Reality Labs so far). So they're quietly pushing it aside and one day when people aren't looking, they'll take it to the back of the house and shoot it in the head. Probably call it an "internal re-org" or something like that.
• asdev 2y ago
  I hope the stock gets destroyed next earnings when people realize they've been spending all this money on AI all to not ship a single meaningful feature nor derive any revenue leveraging it. They did the exact same thing with the whole "Metaverse" thing
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    The metaverse craze was hilarious. I heard of a large retailer that paid ~$0.5 million to hold their annual all-hands in a metaverse "venue". The whole thing collapsed under the weight of a few hundred attendees and they had to revert to a zoom call.
    • zeusk 2y ago
      Meanwhile zoom runs perfectly fine on vision pro. imo, Meta should ditch metaverse and focus on gaming/media/productivity for the headset and leave the social aspects to their rayban-kind devices.
  • werdnapk 2y ago
    Yet, there stock is up over 70-80% last year and I have no idea what they really have to show for it.
    • magnio 2y ago
      Their revenue and net income are up 20% and 70% yoy. Apparently we can still sell more ads than what I thought is possible.
      • nradov 2y ago
        It's not necessarily more ads but rather more effective ads. Meta is among the best ad platforms for targeting. Customers pay a premium for this.
        • lostlogin 2y ago
• bttrpll 2y ago
  If this was actually true there would be a mass drop in accounts across Meta.
• nathanasmith 2y ago
  If I want to talk to AI I know where chatgpt.com is. I don't need it shoved in my face when I'm trying interact with people on social media.
• Dansvidania 2y ago
  that was fast
• pkkkzip 2y ago
  whats apparent to me is that the people who will be reading this thread when they turn old enough to have a mobile phone or laptop will be like when the internet first came out and watching old people scoff and worry about both valid and invalid future problems. the younger generation will not care much whether its generated by an AI or not. As long as its good and it hits their niche, they will not and should not care. the implication and future predictooors dooming is also misplaced. in the sea of generative AI, imperfect, human produced content will end up becoming more valuable. its like hand drawn anime by real humans vs computer assisted ones that mimic the style. younger generation don't even watch or care for the classics and they don't find the intrusion of computer graphics unholy like the rest of us old timers who appreciate and stopped watching it out of ideological differences. it wasn't the end of anime it actually increased the market size several thousand fold by lowering the barrier and cost of production (at the expense of upsetting the "luddites"). Exact same thing will play out across all consumable content. Even hardware.
• 1659447091 2y ago
  This reminds me of the experiments FB was doing to control user emotion. Vibes of the same sliminess. But beyond that, has social media not isolated people enough--soon, a large portion of people using it won't even interact with other actual people... I don't see how a platform meant to "connect" people to others--scratch that, a platform meant to connect people to ad's makes perfect sense.
  • Tier3r 2y ago
    The only reason I can think that this atrocity got deployed was from an engineering perspective, creating AI profiles to engage theoretically gives FB a powerful lever to increase engagement, because you'd have this entire new field to collect data, experiment and test people's responses. In other words, it would turn engagement into a form tractable to optimisation algorithms.
• brap 2y ago
  This is honestly one of the worst ideas Meta has ever had, and this includes the metaverse. Zuck needs to step down, he’s too detached from reality. On the other hand I don’t know who’s left after him, he’s probably surrounded by slimy yes-men.
  • herbst 2y ago
    I don't think they will ever accept that they can't grow anymore and are way after their high times. At this point it's just watching something weird die painfully
  • chikere232 2y ago
    The metaverse was obviously worse. It's already proven that you can build bots good enough to keep some people engaged, and keeping people engaged is good for ad-revenue. It's not as likely that people would like to spend most of their day with a VR headset on, working in a cartoon office.
• BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  s/killing/delaying Until it's good enough it can release it an nobody is the wiser.
• FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Surely they knew this would be the reaction. Was this a big fake out.? What was the real ploy?
• DonHopkins 2y ago
  I wonder if they told them they were about to be killed, and let them have some last words.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• kromem 2y ago
  Having bots have their own profiles authentically engaged as themselves would have been pretty interesting (and I suspect successful). But making up fake minority stereotype bingo cards may have been the worst idea I've ever seen in AI to date.
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    I want to make something like the opposite comment, haha. Having bots with their own profiles and expecting people to engage with them in any meaningful manner is a silly idea. But the extent to which the minority stereotype bingo card bots have backfired and started attacking the companies that designed them is probably the funniest thing to have happened in AI to date.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• spaceguillotine 2y ago
  oh no, they killed off digital blackface!!! Meta really doesn't think things through when the come up with an idea like this, they just see potential revenue numbers with no thought to cultural impact. Regulate them.
• fishywang 2y ago
  I had a facebook account from the early days. I deleted my facebook account at 2018-ish. I never had an instagram account. Recently I got an email from instagram saying it's "easier to get back to instagram", with my usual username. I can't check what's on that instagram user because they don't show you anything without logging in, so I asked my wife to check that instagram user for me. It doesn't have any photos nor profile photo or following, but it does have several followers that's my facebook friends (when I had the account), so at some point meta created that instagram account for me and associated it with my facebook account, I guess? I hope that account was not "AI-powered".
• jdlyga 2y ago
  Obviously this was a bad idea implemented poorly. They never thought about the "why" for any of this. There's real value in fictional chatbots (Character AI) though. With Character AI, you can role play and have outlandish conversations that you might never have with a real person. There's even apps like SocialAI where every profile is AI so you can experience going viral and social media stardom without sacrificing your privacy (at least on paper). But a fictional Facebook profile? Just to like and leave comments? That's nothing you can't do already.
  • nitwit005 2y ago
    I was surprised by the content of the profiles. It seemed as though they were deliberately not fun. It's better to pick a silly theme where if the AI does poorly, people laugh, rather than get upset.
  • hombre_fatal 2y ago
    A lot of the blow back acts like Character.ai and similar setups aren’t wildly popular. This clearly was Meta’s attempt to come up with a more professional, sanitary version of it that might have appeal to people who aren’t techy enough to download C.ai and flip through cringe anime chat bots. And they went too far probably due to corporate design by committee. But the core idea is valid.
  • notatoad 2y ago
    i would love to know more about the internal decision making that led to this release. it all just seems so weird. i can see the appeal of AI actors on social media - you get to make everybody feel more popular than they are because there's always somebody to reply to them, and you can make sure people get responses to their selfish requests that no other real user actually wants to see, without degrading the experience for any actual real people. but why would they implement it as a limited number of obviously handmade profiles with baked-in personalities? the internet is already full of real people's accounts that are, for all intents and purposes, without personality and ephemeral. real people sign up for facebook all the time who don't expose a personality, interact with a couple posts, and then disappear. LLM chatbots could be great at that. LLM chatbots can't be real people.
• thom 2y ago
  The idea of parasocial relationships with infinite bandwidth seems sad, but not necessarily infeasible. I’ve no idea if current technology is there, but the idea of Leela streaming chess while trash talking opponents and answering questions isn’t a million miles from something I’d watch on Twitch. Lean into the superhuman bits. Not sure why I would want to see a bunch of fake normal people though.
  • marginalia_nu 2y ago
    Yeah this was a plot point in Deus Ex 2, where there were kiosks where you could chat with an AI copy of a pop idol called NG Resonance[1]. Long story short, the entire point of the kiosks were to spy on people. That game series had an alarming knack for being prescient. [1] https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/NG_Resonance https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/NG_Resonance
• np_tedious 2y ago
  > Liv, for instance, said that her creator team included zero Black people and was predominantly white and male. There were definitely Chinese and Indian males too
• anigbrowl 2y ago
  Candy candy thank you Belinsky Happy Happy Martha-' https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-7.html https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-7.html
• m3kw9 2y ago
  maybe an AI bot that does AI things, not pretend to be human may be more interesting.
• bigs 2y ago
  In what dystopian world did they think this was what their customers want? Oh right I forgot the end user is not their customer.
• agilob 2y ago
  >proud Black queer momma It's first time I hear about it, why is "Black" capitalised in that profile name?
  • ekimekim 2y ago
    It's a commonly-accepted way to refer to "Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense", particularly African-American culture. See for example the AP's style guide: https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566... and also the relevant wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans#Terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans#Terminology
• Peterthomos 2y ago
  [dead]
• martin82 2y ago
  Why did they have AI profiles to begin with? How did they sit in a meeting and somehow concluded that more idiotic worthless content - the very problem that has effectively already killed facebook years ago - would solve anything at all? These people get multi million dollar salaries, yes?
• rambojohnson 2y ago
  believe me when I say this for reasons I cannot go into,, but no it's not.