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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

#351

Post by mvdtnz »

loeg wrote: post #345
jedberg wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at a similarly gargantuan and dysfunctional company, I can tell you exactly how this went down. Someone had this idea for AI profiles. They speced the product and took it to engineering. The engineers had a good laugh at how preposterous it is, but then remembered that they get paid a ton of money to do what they're told, and will get promos and bonuses for launching regardless of the outcome. It all st…

You're kind of missing the early step where some executive had to sign off on this dumb idea. Otherwise it doesn't launch. It's only "impactful" to engineer performance review because some exec said so.

No, execs do not sign off on every feature. Even at medium size (2000+ employees say) there is far more output being produced than could possibly be signed off by an exec team.

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

#352

Post by Kbelicius »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #341
Trasmatta wrote: post #3

> 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 tr…

I hate the journalists pretending that ML is regurgitating facts instead of just random tokens. The ML model doesn't know who programmed it and can't know because that wasn't in the training data.

> I hate the journalists pretending that ML is regurgitating facts instead of just random tokens.

They aren't claiming that what the AI said was fact. It seems your hate comes from lack of understanding.

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

#354

Post by BoorishBears »

oceansweep wrote: post #337
BoorishBears wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to challenge you to put that first screenshot into ChatGPT/Claude and ask them why it looks like something an intern came up with vs a professional product. I'm not saying that as a slight or an insult, but right now the screenshot looks like a Gradio space someone would use to prove out the underlying tech of a professional product, not a professional product (unless you literally mean professionals are yo…

I don't think you understand the context, the person I was replying to was making that comment about NotebookLM. I'm fully well aware of how my UI looks, the whole reason I'm using Gradio for right now is that it is a single person project that isn't a product for sale. Not quite an intern, but same amount of funding. The current UI is a placeholder, because the idea is to migrate to an API first design so users can…

I guess I really don't understand the context because even with this clarification it's not clear what you're asking past "what does it take to add polish to my nascent project", when the reality is by the nature of it's nascent state no one is going to be able to give you more than surface level advice (which the LLM can provide pretty effectively, and in a more tailored way than we random commenters can. Isn't that fact kind of the underlying of your own project?)

> SoundStorm/Podcast creation is one of the big draws, but I would question as to whether its one of its most-used features, considering hallucinations and shallowness.

You're questioning the one single feature that drove its entire success in distribution? Most people don't know any features except the podcast feature.

If your goal is to address the more underlying concept of getting across knowledge in a quicker more readily absorbed format using LLMs, there's already an insane amount of competition and noise.

The podcast thing was the only reason NotebookLM cut through that noise, so the question shouldn't be "is it one of the most used features" (due to the way conversion rates work it will be btw, it might not be the most used feature by people who stay but obviously the feature that's highest in the funnel drawing people in will be your most used feature) but imo the more relevant question is "is it one of the most important features", and the answer is yes.

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

#355

Post by karel-3d »

devjab wrote: post #242
Trasmatta wrote: post #3

> 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 tr…

I'm Scandinavian and not invested in the American culture wars and I still got a good chuckle out of how bad an idea this was. Who on earth could've thought it was a good idea to get an AI to pretend to be a black queer mother of two? I'm sure it'll piss off a lot of anti-woke people, but really, how on earth did the issues with this not become obvious for the team? I'm not sure if the AI knows who trained it (and I…

I think it will piss off woke people, too.

It seems designed to piss off everyone.

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

#356

Post by notavalleyman »

devjab wrote: post #242
Trasmatta wrote: post #3

> 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 tr…

I'm Scandinavian and not invested in the American culture wars and I still got a good chuckle out of how bad an idea this was. Who on earth could've thought it was a good idea to get an AI to pretend to be a black queer mother of two? I'm sure it'll piss off a lot of anti-woke people, but really, how on earth did the issues with this not become obvious for the team? I'm not sure if the AI knows who trained it (and I…

The article indicates that it was one of 28 personas created by meta. However, the reporters in between the story and you, thought that one would be interesting to you and so promoted it's relevance. In actuality, if you rolled a dice of potential human traits 28 times, this could be a statistically normal combination

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

#357

Post by baxtr »

sonofhans wrote: post #179
motohagiography wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is a really nice insight. I hadn’t put it together this way before. It’s similar to design-by-committee, or movie script-by…

I wonder why so few companies employ Pixar’s Brain Trust method.

You get into a room with a bunch of key execs who are not part of your project and then they tear your product/movie/idea apart.

You don’t have to implement any of their suggestions but since these are seasoned execs they see flaws readily.

The key is that the process encourages candid feedback without hierarchy or defensiveness.

This goes on for a couple of iterations until the idea is ready for production.

I think Apple has something similar.

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

#358

Post by loeg »

mvdtnz wrote: post #351
loeg wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of missing the early step where some executive had to sign off on this dumb idea. Otherwise it doesn't launch. It's only "impactful" to engineer performance review because some exec said so.

No, execs do not sign off on every feature. Even at medium size (2000+ employees say) there is far more output being produced than could possibly be signed off by an exec team.

I don't mean Zuck personally blessed it, but this went up at least three levels of management and all of them said "sure."

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

#359

Post by autoconfig »

chis wrote: post #324
autoconfig wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not at all how things work at Meta. The impact of the things you deliver as an engineer has a direct effect on your performance review. For better or for worse, that also means that engineers have a ton of leverage on deciding what to work on. It's highly unlikely that the engineers working on this were laughing at it while doing so. Don't assume that you can simply pattern match because you've been at anothe…

How do you think it happened, then? Having also worked there the OP’s story makes total sense to me lol. If you’re on a team with the charter to “make AI profiles in IG work” then you’re just inevitably going to turn off your better judgement and make some cringy garbage.

I think the incorrect premise here was that engineers always know what a good product is. :) And I say that as an engineer myself. It's fully possible that the whole team was aligned on a product idea that was bad, it happens all the time. From my experience though, if there's any company where engineers don't just mindlessly follow the PMs and have a lot of agency to set direction, it's Meta. Might differ between orgs but generally that was my experience.

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

#360

Post by loeg »

jedberg wrote: post #350
loeg wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of missing the early step where some executive had to sign off on this dumb idea. Otherwise it doesn't launch. It's only "impactful" to engineer performance review because some exec said so.

Execs go through the promo process too. And also, some execs will sign off on projects that they know are bad but will make for good promo material for them and their reports.

Yeah this is true, just missing from the original comment.
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