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

theguardian.com

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

#261

Post by jedberg »

nthingtohide wrote: post #181
rsynnott wrote: post #88

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’.

A mistake on par with Netflix getting into mobile games. With advent of 5G, nobody plays candy crush saga or such games.

You must be kidding. Look around on public transport. If someone isn't reading something on their phone, they're almost certainly playing some candy crush like game. Apple games is doing well.

Netflix failed because they didn't make games people are interested in, not because people don't want those types of games.

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

#262

Post by bongodongobob »

MrMcCall wrote: post #159
Trasmatta wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

LLMs just predict the next word, based upon the texts they were trained on. They are, by definition, a hallucination. It's just that, sometimes, they put words together that fool people. They're just ELIZA on steroids, people.

Right and computers just do boolean math, not anything useful.

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

#263

Post by deadbabe »

asdev wrote: post #215

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

Why stop at meta? What has any AI company done that creates substantial new profits?

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

#264

Post by diego_sandoval »

rsynnott wrote: post #88

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’.

Next month no one is going to remember this anyway, so they don't lose much by trying.

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

#265

Post by frereubu »

motohagiography wrote: post #251
PKop wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 critic…

this misunderstands what fiction is. for people with the capacity, it's a tool for reasoning about hypotheticals and counterfactuals. sometimes its fun, but mostly it's serious. for the people who get it fiction is a public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary would be like watching golf and thinking it's random. there's a literal mindedness or incapacity for abstraction I can't apprehend in th…

The point is that a fictional story is just one of a host of possibilities, so you can't base decisions off what happens in it rather than the other n-1 possibilities.

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

#266

Post by Hilift »

asdev wrote: post #215

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

META is a cash machine.

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

#267

Post by lukan »

ryandrake wrote: post #176
brookst wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I agreed. But I have seen many products launched where only true believers who internalized the limitations were involved in testing. Yes, a good org with self-critical people and an independent red team and execs who cared about quality would not have made this blunder. Getting that org stuff right sounds easy but is nigh impossible if it doesn’t align to the company culture.

Critics and naysayers tend to leave teams where they don't believe in the product, and eventually teams are left with only true believers. Their entire purpose is to ship Project X, and if they were to admit Project X is a blunder, then they are admitting that their purpose is a blunder. Few teams at few companies are willing to do that.

"and eventually teams are left with only true believers."

Or with nihilists who learned to say yes to everything, to at least get paid.

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

#268

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

whimsicalism wrote: post #182
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

the comedy thing is maybe debatable but the reaction gifs thing is objectively true and kinda weird from my perspective

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?

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

#269

Post by yieldcrv »

notahacker wrote: post #188
hopfenspergerj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I dont think that necessarily applies when you could easily make a training set from some actual black American people’s writings on the internet or book, or even an individual that self identified that way and train on all their writings around the internet, and result in those same stereotypes when you ask an AI to create such a profile

You dont need a black American engineer or product manager to say “I approve this message” or “halt! my representation is more important here and this product would never fly” as they are just not person the data set was trained on, even if you asked an AI to just create the byline on the profile for such a character

its weirder, and more racially insensitive, for people to be vicariously offended on behalf of the group and still not understand the group. In this case, the engineer or product manager or other decision maker wouldnt have the same background as the person that would call themselves “momma”, let alone it not mattering at all, if you can regurgitate that from a training set

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

#270

Post by jdbernard »

motohagiography wrote: post #251
PKop wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 critic…

this misunderstands what fiction is. for people with the capacity, it's a tool for reasoning about hypotheticals and counterfactuals. sometimes its fun, but mostly it's serious. for the people who get it fiction is a public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary would be like watching golf and thinking it's random. there's a literal mindedness or incapacity for abstraction I can't apprehend in th…

The problem with using fiction as a discourse about possibilities is that fiction is governed by the rules of the author's mind, not the rules of reality. So the fidelity of the model being used to drive the discourse is directly dependent on the congruence between the author's internal model of the world and reality, which can often be deceptively far apart. This is especially bad when the subject is entertaining, because most of us read fiction for entertainment, not logical discourse. So we create scenarios that are entertaining rather than realistic. And the better the author is the more subtle the differences are, but that doesn't mean they go away. It feels like a somewhat common experience in my life that I'm discussing some topic with somebody, and I have subject matter expertise based on actual lived experience, and as the conversation goes on I discover that all of my conversation partner's thinking about the subject was done in the context of a fictional world which misses key elements of the real world that lead to very different conclusions and outcomes.

This is not to totally discard fiction as a way of reasoning. With regard to hypotheticals beyond our current reach it is often the only way to reason. So it's valuable, but we have to keep in mind that a story is just a story. Hard experience trumps fictional logic any day. And I can't assume that the same events in real life will lead to the same outcomes from a story.

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