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Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

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Re: Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

#31

Post by ben_w »

timcobb wrote: post #11
throwpoaster wrote: post #10

Dead internet theory: Most Facebook friends are already AI, so he’s just reifying the concept.

Not totally sure what this means, but it feels right

Wikipedia says:

"… a conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Myself, I wouldn't say it's "coordinated" and therefore isn't a "conspiracy", but I would say it's a lot of uncoordinated groups who are intentionally trying to manipulate public opinion — the same people who have been trying to do so ever since whichever was was conceived first (if not named so) of "SEO", "spam", "propaganda", "preaching" etc., it's just that now we have LLMs that can personalise everything, I have to pinky swear I'm not a bot myself because you can't possibly tell from just my words alone.

Re: Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

#35

Post by idkwhattocallme »

pkoird wrote: post #6

> “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” My god, he thinks people like their feed algorithm.

billions of people visit their feed hourly. I think it's fair to say that [some] people like their feed algorithm.

edited to add [some]

Re: Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

#36

Post by AStonesThrow »

krapp wrote: post #14
throwpoaster wrote: post #10

Dead internet theory: Most Facebook friends are already AI, so he’s just reifying the concept.

Most people's Facebook friends are people they know, so probably not. I mean, if this were actually the case there would be no reason to "reify the concept." Reify for whom?

> Most people's Facebook friends are people they know

I'd be skeptical of that at this point.

A few years ago I began to ponder what "friendship" really meant, and whether I indeed had any friends at all. Sure, I retained a few friendly faces from my high school years, but that's about it. My sister and my cousins won't even accept my FB friend requests.

Another thing I noticed was that a large percentage of my FB "friends" were becoming cagey about their own identity. Their profile photos weren't RL depictions; sometimes they weren't even cartoon avatars. A frequent trick for married Catholic women is that they put up a "couples photo" with their husband. Fine, I get it, but that's not what profile photos are for.

So I began to wax skeptical about the identities of the people controlling FB accounts. And you know what? There's no way to know. Even if you've met in person and you're completely satisified that your RL Friend controls the FB credentials, that doesn't mean they're 100% always going to be controlling that account when they're out of your sight.

So I drastically pared down "friends" to people who have my intrinsic trust and faith that they will not fuck around with their identity. Again, I really have no way of knowing. But being that my "friends" list is down to about 5 lucky contestants, I'm not too worried.

Unfortunately that means that my newsfeed is filled with a lot of non-friend content. I try to mostly follow "Official Pages" of reputable businesses with whom I have an actual relationship, so I do get news that I can use, but it's dull reading that newsfeed, honestly.

Re: Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

#37

Post by apical_dendrite »

zelos wrote: post #21

I know it's a bit stupid saying this about the owner of the world's biggest social network, but does he understand people at all? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't need a very advanced AI to replace most friends' interactions on Facebook, but that's completely missing the point.

I actually think a lot of people will want to talk to an AI that's available any time to listen to their problems and give them validation. Whether that's ultimately good or bad, I don't know (I suspect bad).

That's not really friendship, or at least it's just a part of friendship, but I think that's the part that AI is most capable of.

Re: Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

#38

Post by diggan »

pkoird wrote: post #6

> “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” My god, he thinks people like their feed algorithm.

> My god, he thinks people like their feed algorithm.

So, besides this being hilariously out of touch, how come he (seemingly) believes this? Is this perhaps what he says to the public, while believing something else? Or surrounded himself with yes-people who won't actually tell him what they think? Or is he maybe just extrapolating this from usage data and assume because X hours of their day was spent on the feed, they like it?

It's just so hard to imagine how he got to that place, as I don't think I've ever heard anyone (online or offline) about how they like their feed order, it's always complaints about it and how they have to jump through hoops to get it into a chronological order, and hide all the spam/non-friends stuff.

Re: Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

#39

Post by flpm »

Someone having a lot of artificial "friends" algorithmically based on their behavior sounds more like a disorder than a desirable state. Something in-between schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder, but outside your brain. But all is fine, as long someone can make money out of it.

Re: Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI

#40

Post by ctxc »

I get the skepticism. But I already see several people chatting with chatgpt like they would with a friend.

A long memory window will increase stickiness and I don't think this is too far fetched.

I thought too much screentime was bad, but man... Maybe this is how the people who thought TVs were bad felt when they saw people glued to phones.

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