Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

201–210 of 605 posts

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

#201
post #167

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 wo…

Is "engagement" the primary metric of modern life?

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

#203

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’.

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…

> It's like people have already forgotten why people used the non-human beings in Westworld

This is fiction though. Perhaps we didn't forget about that fake thing and we're critiquing this real thing that exists. How can you take a demonstrative position on "what we're going to use them for" and defend it with someone's contrived story?

> because objectively they were bureaucratic abominations

Yes, this is why criticism of this real thing isn't countered by claiming people "forgot" what occurred in a fantasy script about things that don't exist.

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

#204
post #167

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 wo…

Meta's platforms are already filled with AI slop content farms that drive clicks and engagement for them.

I have a FB account for marketplace, and unsubscribed from all my pages and friends. If I log in, my feed is a neverending stream of suggested rage bait, low quality AI photos, nonsensical LLM "tips" on gardening and housekeeping.

The posts seem to attract tens of thousands of reactions and comments from seemingly real people.

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

#205

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.

> 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.

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

#206

> 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…

I find it hard to believe that someone would say something similar about any other aspect of cultural identity and not be instantly flagged for it. Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity? Are you applying that to all the folks in tech who proudly identify as Christian or Jewish? Does it apply to Italian Americans and Indigenous people? What about folks who are proud…

Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity?

(Shrug) If you didn't build it, what could possibly justify taking pride in it?

Pride in inborn cultural identity gets you things like Nazi Germany. It's not a win for either individuals or societies, only for intermediate subgroups whose interests rarely coincide with either.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I would argue that there is not an excess of the former. A lot of the so-called techies don't know tech either.

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

#208
post #167

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 wo…

Is "engagement" the primary metric of modern life?

According to your economic masters, yes, because engagement is a proxy for revenue.

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the kind of rhetoric that has lead to the rise of the right in the western world. It’s something discussed here in this video. https://youtu.be/d5PR5S4xhXQ?si=eW68EoiHgADYhVUv

Everyone wants to be the hero in their own story, changing your beliefs requires introspection and humility. It's far easier to blame somebody else than yourself and take responsibility. It's trivial to feed people some narrative that trivializes reality and, in their mind, acknowledges them as underdogs and elevates them as "right". The triviality of this allows malevolent actors to disrupt society and produce a cha…

I think that’s right. I broadly agree with everything you’ve written here. I’m just dissatisfied with this as a status quo, where more reasonable people have [justifiably] resigned themselves to the reality that reasoning with the unreasonable doesn’t usually pay [moral] dividends.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's that got to do with anything? What's stopping me from identifying variation in the frequency of different traits between ethnic groups in the current day ? It's not a virtue to pretend not to notice such things (or, indeed, to be truly incapable of the most basic pattern recognition). I think the argument could then be made that if you identify traits common to closely related tribes (eg. indigenous East Afric…

People frequently seem to think that identifying these traits is a permanent thing or a fact of nature, rather than as you say, a statement about the current day (and I would add, an often inaccurate statement based on corner cases like those I've mentioned). To make it more than that is a mistaken notion. You can justify a lot of ugly racism that way. Many people do and have. As an example, slavery in the US created…

Ronald, your comment is flagged and I cannot reply. I think it is possible that you are the one working backwards, i.e. you want to consider your opinions on race to be a fact of nature and you get defensive when I point out that this is shaky ground to stand on, so you think I am trying to justify an ideology you are opposed to and attribute some kind of ill will to me. It is not controversial ideology to say for example that slavery was ethically questionable and not based on a good scientific understanding of the origins or nature of man. If you find yourself eager to defend slavery on racial grounds you may want to do some introspection, rather than point fingers at people who tell you this.
Post reply on HN