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Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

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Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#251

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.

that has to be the most black mirror nightmare fuel I've seen so far this year....

Especially because you know a bunch of people will pay for it.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#252
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…

I mostly use Facebook for posting tiling/tesselation art in a moderated speciality group ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/tiling ) that has 72,000 people in it. There are some really nice speciality groups you don't find anywhere else. Facebook's UI is horrific for comments, I think even a bad AI design couldn't be much worse, but the comments are generally pleasant. I check my regular facebook friends occasionally,…

I always thought reddit would be a better place for such topics, and before reddit, forums.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#253
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…

If they gave us Ready Player One or Necromancer they would have crushed it. Gibson knows what possessed them to make the best possible impression of an office space in Purgatory.

Yeah what's crazy is that VRchat has existed for years, aside from getting sick and looking like an idiot, what people want out of VR seems like a solved problem...

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#254
post #239

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…

as a chronically lonely person, I always dreamed of the day AI would reach today's level so that I could create a few imaginary friends for myself. As it happens, I've just gotten used to it now, so I have lost interest in making that sort of thing.

Lt. Barclay is both hero and cautionary tale.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it come with people picking you apart, hatemail, unsolicited nudes, etc.?

I think in an ideal world you could groom your audience to your liking! Personally, if I could suspend my disbelief, I'd love an army of virtual techies telling me how clever my ideas are. Others might prefer a legion of other super moms praising their selfless parenting when no one else does, or like you were getting at, maybe just a peanut gallery! Image gen on-device might be tough, we'll save that for the 1.1 rel…

Even humorless curmudgeons (like me) can get in on the action with a huge array of people to disagree with, act snobby to, and never before heard of stupid opinions!

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#256

We need a tech hype that is not terminally tainted as an anti-human abomination. Is it too much to ask for? Surely those gazillions of GPUs can be deployed to do something actually useful ? Are we beyond redemption?

What you consider “useful” is not useful for others, and vice versa. For some 19 year olds, curating their IG feeds and making the smoothest transition on TikTok to go viral is actually important. It sounds stupid, but we went through this entire debate back in early 2010s. FB/IG/TT/YT obviously won, and seems like that’s what majority of people prefer doing.

This relativism applies to some extent to pure entertainment activities. What is worthwhile, trendy, in-group (or whatever) does vary enormously by region, age group etc.

But these platforms are now for most people "all-there-is". They have replaced effectively any other source of information. What can go wrong when algorithmically titillated echo chambers shape people's mental horizons and behavior? We are increasingly finding out.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#257
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…

I know it's selling him short but I can't help but feel like Zuckerberg is one of the luckiest tech CEOs out there. From all the way back in the mid 2000s when FB totally whiffed on smartphones (Google bought Android and pivoted hard, Facebook could have done the same and just... didn't) I've never come away with any clear sense of what Zuck thinks Facebook is or should be. He took initial market advantage and made a…

His smartest move was ignoring any non-poaching agreement and exploding developer salaries in order to build out a trillion dollar company / ad network. For that I will always appreciate him.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#258

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".

Echo and Narcissus.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I feel like you have be a pretty low IQ person (I'm talking about the millions of people on the far left of the IQ bell curve) to consider any interaction with a bot as socially meaningful or stimulating (dopamine). Maybe if you used some future LLM and hidden the "this is a bot" icon, more people would interact, but as it stands, only dumb people (and there's not that many of them, again, normal distri…

character. ai exists somewhat profitably right now, and Replika had very dedicated users, so that doesn't rule out an audience who just wants to be lied to

C.ai they changed their model at some point and now I get short, terse, boring responses as if it hates talking to me. I felt like I lost a friend when they lobotomized it.
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