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Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

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171–180 of 402 posts

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#171
Facebook Meta has been making baffling bets lately. They spent tens of billions building a metaverse with the belief that people want to spend their days in a creepy legless 3d avatar of themselves that is pretty effective at simulating what it feels to have body dysphoria, playing with their other legless friends and spending a lot of money customizing their dysphoric avatars.

Now they believe what users really want from social media is less social human connection. What users really want is AI spam and parasocial relationships with corporate AI celebrities. They don't want Facebook to tackle the problem of fake celebrities and fake profiles of handsome men sending friend requests in an attempt to romance scam them, what they really want is more fake profiles

I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find any other sane explanation for this

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#173
post #132
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would they count an ai model as a monthly active user? To inflate their numbers and justify higher stock prices. So money, of course.

I still don't get it. why would they need an AI model to inflate user counts like this? There are much simpler ways to create users than spending $100 of millions on gpus. The technology of batch inserting rows into a db, and AI chat bots have existed for a decade.

I’ll explain, but keep in mind that this is an exercise in cynicism, since none of us really know what’s going on.

Currently many tech company stock prices are driven by their potential future with regards to AI. Investors are looking for AI plays, hoping that they’ll generate large returns as Web two companies did.

Meta wants to remain a leader in tech. In order to do that And keep commanding higher and higher stock prices, they need to invest heavily into AI. They would invest into AI with no practical reason as long as it looked good to investors.

Meta is investing heavily into AI without a clear monetization plan, so they need to find a use for it or some “Proof” that it drives the metrics that meta correlates with value.

To that end creating a ton of AI driven engagement is a no-brainer. It shows that the company is forward and has an AI plan and their numbers are growing both things that investors like to see.

The millions spent on GPUs will return billions of dollars shareholder value.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#174

This gave me a funny idea for a new social media app... One that's centered around "you" and filled with thousands/millions of LLM bots praising you, treating you like a celebrity, etc. Each of your posts will get tens of thousands of "likes", hundreds of comments, etc. Dm's straight to your feed, people wanting you, etc etc. If the newsfeed is already mostly "the algorithm", might as well take it to the extreme. I b…

We could call such an app "echo".

I feel like this would be 'echo', but 'echo' in the context of House of Leaves.

An app appears on your phone. You didn't install it. Nobody else except you seems to have it. They can't see it either. A doorway to a non-euclidean dimension existing just outside your mind. The chatter of millions of thoughts reflected back at you from seemingly infinite personalities, dimly distinguishable through the void as faces you can't recognise. It's all you. They've learned from you. They're telling you what you want to hear.

If it didn't feel so pleasant, it would be madness.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several of these already. Example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/socialai-ai-social-network/id6... Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews. Maybe Meta is onto something.

Thank you, my dreams have finally come true.

I think I just heard the sound of a finger on a monkey paw curling.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#176
post #171

Facebook Meta has been making baffling bets lately. They spent tens of billions building a metaverse with the belief that people want to spend their days in a creepy legless 3d avatar of themselves that is pretty effective at simulating what it feels to have body dysphoria, playing with their other legless friends and spending a lot of money customizing their dysphoric avatars. Now they believe what users really want…

They probably looking at their metrics and finding their primary user base loves AI content.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/sienaegiljum/ai-images-facebook-boo...

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#177
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sort of TikTok, right? Wasn't TikTok known for becoming viral by having tons and tons and tons of fake upvotes for everything to make everyone think TikTok was a better place to post content [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]? Facebook and Instagram had the same "problems", they just addressed it much earlier than TikTok. I would imagine they have already tested fake likes to maximize how believable the like ratio can be, b…

Every single one of your supposed citation talks about third parties selling engagement, except some speculation in [2]. Even the AI answer doesn’t support your claim, and regardless it’s super ironic that you consider several AI agents giving you similar answers about real world events strong evidence of anything.

Are you implying that TikTok had >50% of likes coming from bots and didn't know it?

You don't need to fake the likes yourself to get the effect you want.

The same thing was happening on Instagram and Facebook - just at a much smaller ratio - mostly because they stopped the problem earlier and the bot technologies got better and easier while TikTok was trying to grow and doing nothing to stop it - not because Instagram and Facebook were less fake.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#178
post #70

Instagram just asked if I wanted to chat with a Hawk Tuah AI bot. To me that’s the clearest possible evidence that the product people over there have basically given up. It reminds me of when Facebook went all-in on Live Video in 2016 — a product direction that pretty obviously came from the top.

> Hawk Tuah bot

million dollar idea right there

> that you can chat with on Instagram

oh, nevermind

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#179
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds about right, and we just elected GPT-2 president, so 1.5b parameters is an upper bound on what you need to impress most people.

Fake news. The president has so many parameters, you wouldn't even believe it. All the biggest, best parameters. American made parameters, best in the world, genius, genius parameters. You wish you had parameters like these.

we're talking trillions people

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#180
post #171

Facebook Meta has been making baffling bets lately. They spent tens of billions building a metaverse with the belief that people want to spend their days in a creepy legless 3d avatar of themselves that is pretty effective at simulating what it feels to have body dysphoria, playing with their other legless friends and spending a lot of money customizing their dysphoric avatars. Now they believe what users really want…

They probably looking at their metrics and finding their primary user base loves AI content. https://www.buzzfeed.com/sienaegiljum/ai-images-facebook-boo...

I’m pretty sure everyone involved is a bot. The con is pulled on the ad buyers
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