Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 605 posts

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

#541

Post by johnvanommen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #272
TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself generally wondering the same thing about half the things coming out of SV over the past several years. I have worked with competent product organizations. I know they exist. A few even exist in SV. But for some reason the largest players have just absolutely lost the plot beyond what can get them to favorable quarterly earnings, and that game eventually and fairly consistently doesn’t end well in the lo…

It's pretty simple in my view. It's "where does the money come from" and at Meta it's not from their users. So they are motivated to entrap and wall in and build funnels to try to deliver their users to the people who are actually giving them money. They aren't building things users want. They are building things that they think will keep the users from leaving.

That makes a lot of sense. My Facebook feed is almost 100% hobby stuff now. Sometimes my wife will say "hey did you see this thing that [family member] posted" and I haven't. And I assume the reason I haven't, is because the content from my hobbies is crowding out the original purpose of Facebook (connect with friends and family.)

Worst of all, is that Facebook is a terrible platform for hobby stuff. Plain ol' PHP forums are much better for that; they're much easier to navigate, easier to search, easier to host pictures on, etc.

I frequently find myself posting something on one of the Facebook hobby forums, then realizing that:

* the signal to noise ratio isn't great, because there's a ton of people spamming those forums with products and other social media that they're trying to promote, YT in particular.

* Facebook isn't great for long posts.

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

#542

Post by johnvanommen »

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…

> 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 would think that the obvious use of AI Facebook profiles would be to train them on someone who actually existed in the real world. Take someone like Jimmy Carter, train an LLM on everything he's ever said, and then let people interact with that.

But I imagine there are legal reasons they can't do this?

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

#543

Post by NegatioN »

johnvanommen wrote: post #511
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'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:…

I feel like the way Romero and Carmack wanted to make the player "connect" with the game was different than what Tom had in mind (from reading the book).

Tom wanted elaborate lore and story-telling, while the rest wanted to make the game experience what the player connected to. The instant reaction to your input, seeing your bad-ass character (and by extension yourself) inflict awesome damage on the world.

This to me is more of a conflict of _what_ the player should connect to, as opposed to not wanting the player to connect at all.

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

#544

Post by HKH2 »

WD-42 wrote: post #535
HKH2 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are you arguing with a bot in the first place. Makes no sense.

Disagreeing with a point of view is not arguing.

Understanding how someone has got to a point of view I disagree with can be useful.

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

#545

Post by RonaldDump »

asveikau wrote: post #210
asveikau wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

[dead]

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

#546

Post by redleader55 »

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…

> This is probably true,

I'm not sure we get to both complain that bots are trained by "white males" and at the same time complain that big tech abuse H1B visas for cheap compliant labourers.

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

#547

Post by tsimionescu »

jlebar wrote: post #525
tsimionescu wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans use tiny amounts of energy compared to even a smartphone. And they consume the vast majority of that energy regardless of whether they're lounging in bed or pouring over medical records.

A human burns say 2000 kcal / day. That's about 2.3kW hours / day. An iPhone 16 pro battery appears to have about 18 watt hours. So approximately 100x less then a human uses.

Oops, you're right, I misremembered some basic facts here...

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

#548

Post by xigency »

theptip wrote: post #192
lm28469 wrote: post #155

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.

I agree with your take.

Outside of how asocial and hostile society has become, there are certain people who understand more eccentric or fringe ideas and they can be quite rare.

I can see how supplementing some amount of artificial conversation can keep one better primed for interacting with the (rarer) people who might be more engaging on an individual level.

More of a stepping stone to realizing that other people might be interesting by finding value in human ideas.

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

#549

Post by rsynnott »

jedberg wrote: post #259
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’.

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…

I suppose the key dysfunction there is that someone can simply have an idea and get it done, without, presumably, review by other product folks or sensible acceptance criteria being put in place.

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

#550

Post by rsynnott »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #328
mupuff1234 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't fathom how anyone thought this was a sensible thing. It's so bad I have to wonder if there's a different angle here, maybe they think that releasing something so terribly bad will make it easier when they release something less comically bad? Idk.

Working in ML Engineering this doesn’t surprise me in the least. The ratio between “impressiveness of technology” to “the number of practical problems actually solved” is probably higher for LLMs than just about any tech to come out in my career, probably longer. Every executive at every company is tripping over themselves to incorporate “AI” (which is almost exclusively defined as LLMs, for some reason) into their p…

> Every executive at every company is tripping over themselves to incorporate “AI” (which is almost exclusively defined as LLMs, for some reason) into their products

I think a hangover from the last AI winter, after which everything that would previously have been called ‘AI’ got called ‘ML’, the term ‘AI’ then being shareholder poison. Anything older than the current AI bubble mostly gets called ‘ML’ still, with a possible exception for non-LLMish CV stuff.

Post reply on HN