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

theguardian.com

511–520 of 605 posts

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

#511

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…

> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore.

I'm listening to "Masters of Doom" on Audible. It's about the creation of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. Great book.

Something that's interesting about it, is that Id Software seemed to largely reject the idea of having a game where the players 'connected' to the characters or the story. They were laser focused on:

* Carmack creating a game engine that was the best in the world

* Romero and crew making the gameplay as fun as possible

But it sounded like they had folks on the team who wanted to make a story where the players could 'connect' with the protagonist. He was fired.

Some dude named "Tom."

Facebook, weirdly enough, seems to have the issue. Which is particularly odd considering that's their product!

I haven't played games in ages, but when I saw "Half Life" for the first time, it felt nearly as "revolutionary" to me as Wolfenstein 3D was.

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

#512
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…

Fiction is a story that an author wants to tell, for whatever reason. It doesn't necessarily follow rational rules, it follows the rules of story telling. Fictional people do things because it makes the story more interesting, not because they have some internal logic to their actions.

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

#513
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps the product manager was a black queer mother of two?

Maybe everyone of the 28 AI "people" represents one of the team members, but that doesn't make it any less of a bad idea in my eyes. As a father of girls I've seen full well how representation matters in media, but I suspect that AI "people" is the one area where people will want as little representation as possible.

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

#514

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’.

An annoying person with a terrible idea is a powerful force at a tech company.

Nobody wants to deal with them, so they just kinda get what they want as long as they are mostly harmless.

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

#515

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.

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.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should try to socialize in real life. The web is 90% rage baits, trolls, people completely brain washed by fringe conspiracy theories and politics IRL these 90% turn into 10%, if you really care about socializing you'll have more meaningful interactions with the grandma living next door than with the queer black queen zuckerbot ™ It's like if people asked supermarkets to hide plastic apples amongst the real on…

What if socializing IRL is something you can practice with pro-social bots? Or, what if depressed people find the pressure of consequences too stressful to “just go outside and make friends”, and so the realistic options are chatbot or not enough socialization? There are obvious nuanced issues and risks here but to distill it down to a one liner like “try to socialize IRL” is myopic.

What's myopic about it? That's what your brain has evolved to do over hundred thousands on years and we fucked it up in two generations...

Depression skyrocketed since social medias were introduced, I very much doubt adding bots to the equation solves anything. You'd be treating the symptoms, not the cause

And again, you're not going to cure obesity by eating plastic apples

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

#518
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…

Agree, fiction and narrative is a fundamental method of human reasoning, one of the first and oldest.

I think a lot of people are reacting to this are missing some of the point - fictions may not literally model reality, but what makes certain fiction memorable is it shines light on some under-expressed aspect of reality, which sticks with us when we encounter a similar pattern in our lives. Whether its also serving entertainment purposes or the author's pet peeves is beside the point, because that is not the part of the fiction to be taken seriously.

We have all sorts of relevant quotes about this:

> all models are wrong, some are useful

> truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations

> We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. - Picasso

Aside from the obvious perception-is-reality aspect of fiction, it's especially important to take fiction seriously these days because the tech world is eyeing the many gray areas between fiction and reality as the next frontier for expansion. These avatars are a perfect example of this attempt to acquire more of the territory of human experience; not just the material reality but the many possible directions our hearts and drives may take us. If we dismiss fiction as something to take less seriously than 'reality', rather than something to be understood in a different way than rational analysis (and with its own skill tree), then we cede this territory to those that know how to wield it against us.

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

#519
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting people talk their thought processes through without conflict seems more productive than them prefiltering what they want to say. You can get so conditioned to expect negative feedback that you refuse to follow your curiosity.

You do need to learn how to deal with negative feedback tho. People should write letters and emails and long form messages if they want to say a whole thing without interruption. My concern with working through an idea with a bot is you end up espousing the bots ideas and not your own -- it is the ultimate ideological homogenization.

The more you deal with your insecurities, the easier it is to handle negative feedback.

People may not have the time or patience to write long form writing.

There are plenty of times I've disagreed with bots, but they're pretty good at neutrally bridging gaps instead of getting emotional. I think you underestimate human impulsiveness.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really grinds my gears is the CO2 emissions and power-grid load that's being used for this stupid arms race. I realize that there's no magic solution to perverse systems like this, but it really bothers me nonetheless.

Inference uses hardly any compute. You should be complaining about computer games for real compute use.

What about crypto?
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