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With no sarcasm, I truly can not understand Facebook's end game here. Why would anyone choose to spend their time interacting with fake people, pushing a corpor

by jerf 2y ago

With no sarcasm, I truly can not understand Facebook's end game here. Why would anyone choose to spend their time interacting with fake people, pushing a corporate party line to sell you something? Already plenty of people are tuning out of the current Facebook. How is stuffing it full of fake people going to help? Like, I can just about understand how this can goose certain short-term metrics but how would it actually make money? Fake people pushing ads on us is already a thing, that field has already been harvested, it's not like some fresh new frontier. Ads already fake this stuff, fake testimonials, fake reviews, fake web sites, fake profiles posting fake statuses for ulterior reasons. I don't see how openly hooking up LLM tech to this helps them. Covertly, I can at least cynically guess at some things, but this current approach I don't get at all. Short of, "we've got a huge stock bump from the AI bubble, but in reality we can't actually find a way it can help us proportionally to the cost, and this is the best Hail Mary anyone has come up with to prevent an accurate revaluation of our stock."

mysterydip 2y ago
I wonder if this is like the social media equivalent of the sims? Or a soap opera. Log in to see if jimmy works up the courage to ask out rhonda. Will ashley find out about the secret william told you? It's like a westworld where you're "safe" to interact socially in any way you feel, because they don't feel anything. As long as you click a few ads a day to keep the lights on.
karmakurtisaani 2y ago
People like you and me found the idea of injecting personalized ads between posts by real people disturbing. It worked fantastically for the company. Now we think AI users subtly pushing for products such as delicious Coca Cola (TM) - refresh your day with a cool glass of Coca Cola (TM) - is a terrible idea. I expect it will again go fantastically for the company. It just keeps getting worse and worse.
RiverCrochet 2y ago
> Why would anyone choose to spend their time interacting with fake people, pushing a corporate party line to sell you something? Really, functionally, what is the difference between any of the following other than in degree: - Account that is nothing but AI generated content. - Bot controlled accounts that spam messages at opportune times or can react to keywords detected in comments - Account that belongs to an influencer and only consists of and posts influencer content. - Account that is nothing but trolling/boosting with political memes. - Account that belongs to a company and only posts memes and other advertisement type posts. - Any account with activity trying to get likes, karma, etc. to gain privileges on the app or simply increase a displayed score. All of the above are varying degrees of fake/non-authentic, and the non AI ones have been around a long, long time. These are everywhere and create engagement on multiple platforms despite people knowing about them and complaining about them. So I can understand why someone may think an AI model can possibly capture that essence and increase/lock-in engagement further. I'm pessimistic enough to think it will work if done the right way.
- jerf 2y ago
  I was still grasping at how to phrase it, but that is definitely the sort of thing I was trying to get at, not that this is some massive change of the rules of engagement (war analogy at this point selected quite deliberately), but instead, an awful lot of money poured into plowing a field that is probably already overplowed. And doing it openly is even weirder.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
Meta (like microsoft, google, etc) have a monopoly mindset and are past thinking about what the consumer wants, they can only think about what they want. So it wasn't a case of 'would users want to follow our fake account's content?', but rather 'AI accounts will give us even more control over content, and we could use them for sponsored content and make even more money'.

by jerf 2y ago

mysterydip 2y ago

I wonder if this is like the social media equivalent of the sims? Or a soap opera. Log in to see if jimmy works up the courage to ask out rhonda. Will ashley find out about the secret william told you? It's like a westworld where you're "safe" to interact socially in any way you feel, because they don't feel anything. As long as you click a few ads a day to keep the lights on.

karmakurtisaani 2y ago

People like you and me found the idea of injecting personalized ads between posts by real people disturbing. It worked fantastically for the company. Now we think AI users subtly pushing for products such as delicious Coca Cola (TM) - refresh your day with a cool glass of Coca Cola (TM) - is a terrible idea. I expect it will again go fantastically for the company. It just keeps getting worse and worse.

RiverCrochet 2y ago

> Why would anyone choose to spend their time interacting with fake people, pushing a corporate party line to sell you something? Really, functionally, what is the difference between any of the following other than in degree: - Account that is nothing but AI generated content. - Bot controlled accounts that spam messages at opportune times or can react to keywords detected in comments - Account that belongs to an influencer and only consists of and posts influencer content. - Account that is nothing but trolling/boosting with political memes. - Account that belongs to a company and only posts memes and other advertisement type posts. - Any account with activity trying to get likes, karma, etc. to gain privileges on the app or simply increase a displayed score. All of the above are varying degrees of fake/non-authentic, and the non AI ones have been around a long, long time. These are everywhere and create engagement on multiple platforms despite people knowing about them and complaining about them. So I can understand why someone may think an AI model can possibly capture that essence and increase/lock-in engagement further. I'm pessimistic enough to think it will work if done the right way.

jerf 2y ago
I was still grasping at how to phrase it, but that is definitely the sort of thing I was trying to get at, not that this is some massive change of the rules of engagement (war analogy at this point selected quite deliberately), but instead, an awful lot of money poured into plowing a field that is probably already overplowed. And doing it openly is even weirder.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

Meta (like microsoft, google, etc) have a monopoly mindset and are past thinking about what the consumer wants, they can only think about what they want. So it wasn't a case of 'would users want to follow our fake account's content?', but rather 'AI accounts will give us even more control over content, and we could use them for sponsored content and make even more money'.