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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

#311

Post by finnthehuman »

friend_Fernando wrote: post #10

I think we actually need more bots discussing politics online. Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony chambers. The only way to salvage democracy is to bring it back offline. Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions. It's time for the good guys to get their hands dirty and break the spell. Trolls cannot be silenced, but they can be offset…

>Online, it was undermined by troll farms

Meh, the conversation had already been undermined by that point. People discussing politics already ceded the conversation to people who liked fiery arguments. The posting farms were just convenient scapegoats for flameposters to explain why they weren't winning, and try to salvage some reputability.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#312

Post by EGreg »

What they want, they will have. We have no say.

Who here remembers: "Stay calm. Breathe. We hear you."

Why don't we also have more bots on HN? Oh yeah.

But serious question ... why in 2024 do we have our own widely-available tools for Web1 (Wordpress powers 40% of all web sites) and Web3 (all the semi-geeky protocols, like UniSwap, and wallets) but for Web2 we have, uh, Mastodon and Diaspora? Where is the real open source competitor to Facebook, Twitter, et al?

Otherwise it's their world and we just all live in it. Just to communicate with your friends. Just to have a platform. You have to put up with whatever they want. And give them all your followers. And content. So they can monetize it and make billions, train their AIs on it then dump you. That's the bargain.

And in the meantime they will spy on all their users, try to push advertising and newsfeeds and notifications and bots down their throats, and play their content creators against each other etc.

I'd be saying this about huge AI models trained on corporate clusters but Zuck actually spent billions on giving away an open source one (thanks to that fiasco with researchers leaking weights, LLaMa became sort of the Mozilla of AI models). But AI is recent, Web2 is ancient, where are the open alternatives?

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#313

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

nradov wrote: post #84
alex1138 wrote: post #11

Hey here's a novel idea Have social media websites be reverse chronological posts by friends/pages you follow instead of what AI thinks you're interested in (and yet somehow not explicitly following, yet you get it in your feed anyway)

Most users don't want reverse chronological feeds. They say they do but they really don't, and fail to appreciate how that would actually work. First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed. Second, if you don't log on for a while you're likely to miss some major life events (birth, death, marriage, divorce, move, new job) that people most want to see.

> First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed

For 'social influencers' sure, but normal users don't care about that. Removing the engagement hacked platform that primarily benefits social influencers would be a significant improvement for most users on most social media platforms.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#314

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

friend_Fernando wrote: post #10

I think we actually need more bots discussing politics online. Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony chambers. The only way to salvage democracy is to bring it back offline. Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions. It's time for the good guys to get their hands dirty and break the spell. Trolls cannot be silenced, but they can be offset…

Considering the state of offline media today, I doubt there is any going back to the real or imagined pre-internet days of media.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#315

Post by elboru »

k1kingy wrote: post #41

My FB timeline is already a complete mess with most irrelevant garbage as it stands. Not exactly sure what adding additional 'noise' is going to achieve outside of boosting numbers (which I guess is what they want). A current snapshot my feed: - Group post (from one I follow) - Ad - Post (from company I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from one I follow) - Ad - Group post (from Gro…

Wow, the amount of ads I get is insane. For every three posts, one is an ad:

  - Post (from a friend)
  - Ad
  - Post (from a random page I don't follow)
  - People you may know (I don't know any of those people)
  - Ad
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)
  - Post (from a random page I don't follow)
  - Ad
  - Post (from a friend)
  - Post (from a page I follow)
  - Ad

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#316

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

altruios wrote: post #181
bluGill wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that? Facebook fills a niche that nothing else tries to. Facebook also does lots of other things that others do better, but they have a niche in sharing the semi private lives of friends with each other that nothing else does.

Semi private life sharing can be done in a discord 'house'. There are many other platforms that fill that same niche.

which involves everyone being on discord. Of all the social network platforms I've used/use, discord is the most stratified in terms of people/groups just not using it at all and having no interest in it.

Facebook initially had a wide appeal, discord never did.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#317

Post by freehorse »

herbst wrote: post #274
freehorse wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression from reddit posts was that replika had/has a lot of female users. Though I do not think that I personally understand it, I think that there are many reasons people can "fall" for something like this and circumstances that can drive it. Loneliness is not to be underestimated. In any case, I am not sure it is _that_ much "dumper" than the parasocial relationships with onlyfans (or other) influencers, for…

I build a diy-sexy-chatbot in the past, that's also the way I advertised it more or less. And to my own surprise many people choose to use it in a non sexy way. I don't know what they talked about (obviously) but many choose neutral tags like 'honest' 'sweet' 'pessimistic' over all the kinky stuff I gave them. Later I tried a similar approach advertising it less sexy and that didn't convert at all. I think people act…

There was this big pushback when replika put an end to sexual interactions with their AIs. People who pushed back were not just using the AIs for sexting sort of things, but it was part of the "connection" aspect, at least how I interpreted it. A lot of people seemed like genuinely grieving at the time this and some other changes happened (later at least the sexual thing came back). It is probably an aspect of what a few people want but not the whole thing for them.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#318

Post by Levitz »

lazide wrote: post #251
cultofmetatron wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd rather have those who get high off this kind of attention satisfy that need with a bot than foster in echo chambers, which is what usually happens.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#320

Post by BeFlatXIII »

k1kingy wrote: post #41

My FB timeline is already a complete mess with most irrelevant garbage as it stands. Not exactly sure what adding additional 'noise' is going to achieve outside of boosting numbers (which I guess is what they want). A current snapshot my feed: - Group post (from one I follow) - Ad - Post (from company I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from one I follow) - Ad - Group post (from Gro…

> it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know.

At least for me, it's because the people I care about have long ago stopped posting, and those who are useful to keep as friends post garbage, so they've long ago been muted.

I wish there were more posts from groups I follow instead of nonsense from groups they recommend.

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