Meta's AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop
hubie writes:
Update 1/03/24: After the publication of this article, Meta told 404 Media that it had begun to delete the AI-generated accounts and that many had been managed by humans. Since then, Meta has deleted the accounts. Our original story follows below.
As I stared into the dead-eyed visage of "Carter," one of Meta's new AI posters, I remembered a line from Dawn of the Dead. "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth."
Something about George Romero's 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall feels resonant today as I look across Meta's suite of AI-created profiles. The movie's blue-skinned corpses don't know they're dead. They just wander through the shopping center on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.
That's how many of our social media spaces feel now. Digital town squares populated by undead posters, zombies spouting lines they learned from an LLM, the digested material from decades of the internet spewed back at the audience. That's what Meta is selling now.
Meta's various sites have over 3 billion users, an incredible percentage of the world's population. But businesses demand constant growth and, not content with almost half of the living people on the planet, Meta has decided to cut out the middle-man. It is flooding Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated posters of its own creation.
A December 27, 2024 article in Financial Times laid out the vision. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, vice president of generative AI at Meta, told the outlet. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform...that's where we see all of this going."
[...] The AIs don't seem to be faring well on Instagram. They have low engagement numbers and people are calling them out as AI slop. It's different on Facebook, where the norm has been AI-powered slop for a year now. The post has 13 likes and 2 comments on Instagram and 192 likes, 112 comments, and 33 shares on Facebook. Many of the comments are spam, links to other profiles, or phishing bait of one kind or another.
But it's all interaction and, on a spreadsheet, that's all that matters.
[...] The AI apocalypse is here and it's far stupider and more depressing than we were promised. Instead of being hunted down by a gleaming metal skeleton in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, we are surrounded by zombies endlessly repeating our own posts back to us.
And the worst is yet to come. Remember that to power these nightmares Big Tech is going to revive the nuclear power industry. That's our future. A barren mall kept alight with nuclear power, filled with the dead and the never-born.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.