Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

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 bet tons of people would get addicted to the dopamine hit of celebrity status (whether it's bots or not).

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 Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Post (from person I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Post (from person I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from one I follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from one I follow)

I gave up writing the above, but it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know.

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

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.

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)

I think this whole thing can mostly be explained by the job titles. What do you expect the "Vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta" to be pushing for?

This is happening across hundreds (thousands?) of companies right now. They've decided they need a generative AI strategy, there's very little existing precedent for what works and what doesn't so they're hurling things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Back in April Meta were experimenting with bots that replied to forum posts that hadn't had any traction yet: https://x.com/korolova/status/1780450925028548821

Their "Meta AI" bot replied to a parent asking for advice on school programs and said:

> I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program. We've had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.

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?

Most likely an effort to boost the DAU numbers. I quit facebook over a decade ago because I truly felt that it was pointless. At the time I was convincing myself that it's a way to stay in touch with a certain number of people I would otherwise have no way of contacting. Then a friend said something that changed my mind: "If someone is not actively a part of your life, chances are there's a good reason they are not". And he was right: I deleted it, knowing full well that I'd have no other way to connect to hundreds of people. Over a decade later I haven't had the reason to try and contact either one of them. At this point, I don't even know what facebook looks like but all this AI-generated crap is just as pointless as the ads that would get shoved down my throat if I didn't have a very aggressive ad blocker. As much as I was strongly against ad blockers 10 years ago, since many sites and blogs used only that to get some reward for their effort, we are at a point where the internet is unusable without an ad blocker. All major platforms are flooded by AI-generated crap. And I mean Facebook, Medium, StackExchange, hell, I'm willing to bet a good chunk of papers coming out these days are mostly ai-generated. And don't even get me started on musk's shithole that is Twitter. No, I am not saying that AI is not useful or helpful - it is, but it should be a supplement, not the primary ingredient, let alone the sole ingredient.

The true value of the internet used to be the collective knowledge, and not mass-produced regurgitated set of tokens and pixel values. Personally I've gone to the even pre-rss days and have a list of personal blogs I scroll through for things I find interesting and avoid large platforms altogether. Interestingly enough, I've been finding more and more motivation to start writing myself though I rarely get the chance to push it through the end and in most cases I get stuck at 95% for many months until I get to find the time to do the remaining 5% of the work. That's how many I have lined up so far:

git status . | wc -l 59

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.

Yea... It's not 10 years ago, Meta is desperately trying to remain relevant but no one except "middle aged normies" uses it and those people are either slowly dying out or just using multiple platforms. The point is FB growth is all fake, their ad market is fake, now the userbase will be also fake.

After "the metaverse" completely crashed and burned, the only option Zuck has is to go 100% AI, maximum speed, never look back.

There are probably AI Instagrammers already. Their lives are better than yours. There are already AI crypto influencers.

Dead internet isn't a theory anymore, it's a product.

It makes sense to me. Meta knows who their real users are and what their real users want to consume. They know who their real advertisers are and what they are willing to pay to reach their real users.

This means they know what their real users would like to consume but can't, because that content isn't being created.

Why wait and hope that content your real users want to consume gets created? Have AI create that content. Now you have more product for your advertisers to pay for, plus it is the juicy, premium rate stuff you know they'd want to buy.

With all your data, it practically automates itself.

I'm not saying all this is good, just that it totally makes sense if you are in the business of making money and see yourself as doing that by giving both your users and your advertisers what they want.

Since Eliza we've known that people love interacting with bots, especially if they fake innocence or cause outrage. Us old folks saw it on IRC, crude markov chains puking out bits of the Bible and porn getting large amounts of "engagement" year after year.

Meta knows this and wants to make money off of it. Connecting people around "engagement" failed and caused a lot of murder and that wasn't good for PR and relations to politicians. Keeping people around ads with bots though? Probably seems both safe and lucrative. Come for the mom selling used sports gear, stay for the late night chats with a machine that's a better listener than your over worked partner.

Socialization is about conspecifics. AI may augment the process for humans, but you can't expect people at large to engage with nonhumans. I mean, people do talk to their pets, but they don't consider that socializing.

I was on a Facebook group for SWEs (can't remember which one), and I had the distinct feeling a person I was engaging with was a bot. All his comments were boilerplate takes or non-sequitur replies, and he ultimately agreed with every point I made. I assumed I was just being paranoid, but maybe not.

I wonder how these bots will impact their metrics reported to investors. Will they be filtered out or into a different bucket, or just included into the mau and similar.

It seems like this should open up an opportunity for some enterprising people to make a Facebook and Instagram competitor that isn't filled with AI bots.

I wondered why my Facebook feed no longer had updates from my friends. Alas the Redditification of Facebook is well on its way.

We're at the tipping point where average users cannot tell the difference between AI generated and human content. It's already very evident on Facebook and Threads, just spend a few minutes on either platform, you'll find a post with an AI generated image or video and tons of human engagement supporting it.

I guess they decided this counts towards DAUs…

At some point, we will have no idea that the majority of the commenters we're interacting with are actually just generative AI.

Related: I've found that the internet becomes significantly better when I use a Chrome extension to hide all comment sections. Comments are by far the most significant source of toxicity.

Create additional engagement ... with nonexistent entities.

So Facebook maintains it's commitment to promoting the opposite of a healthy society.

I actually can't decide if non-human interactions on Facebook are a better or worse option than the current echo chambers.

The way to fix facebook is to get off of facebook. Time for the next thing already!

Calling out something that seems obvious to me, but is not visible ITT:

This is Facebook doing their main MO, which is to reproduce social products that are exhibiting hockey-stick growth. They are looking at character.ai et al.

I've witnessed many people behave towards machines in a way that would be considered very rude were it towards biological beings. Makes one wonder if "Rage Against The Machine" were visionaries...

My feed is less than 5% people posted content now anyway because friends and familly stopped posting. Ultimately, everyone posting was a fad that has faded, and we're moving back to curated content again.

So this is basically the bitcoin of social media engagement? I don't have any followers, I will just make some? Who's to say they're not real followers? What is this "real" anyway?

I think the problem, in general, is that search (and find!) becomes impossible with layers of copycat and automated content generation. It seems we returned to a pre-Internet era to promote our work.

Found this: an Instagram account made by Meta AI

https://www.instagram.com/himamaliv

Well that makes sense. If you bother to look at how much engagement all those fake female accounts are generating it's no wonder that Facebook wants to own that game too.

This is the social media equivalent of "pricing death spiral" type behaviour where every attempt to boost engagement reduces it even more.

I quit FB 3 years ago. It's already riddled with bots, AI generated "content" and ragebait.

If this doesn't push you away from it, what will?

Where is the moat? If all you want is praise from large language models then a local LLM can do that just fine right now.

They're coming for the influencers. This is another avenue for advertising. That's the end game in this.

Shifting the Overton Window as a Service

Well that’s a new kind of economy AI making apps so AI bots can post around …

Maybe we should just pull the plug already?

Ad free social media. Now your feed is filled with personal recommendations from "friends".

Genuine question: is this how Meta gets into the lucrative synthetic romantic partner business?

I think it could greatly assist in moderating those networks, to fight spam, trolls etc.

AI Bots will post advertising and astroturf their company products and services.

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?

There's so much low quality human or non-AI bot content on FB already, plus every other timeline ad I see is a scam of some kind.

XKCD 810 comes to mind.

(I only use the site to stay in touch with some family of my parents' generation. Messenger/Whatsapp are still tools I use regularly.)

They gonna sherlock influencers

Wait until they have to tell advertisers how much of their engagement is actually fake.-

(Assuming they ever ...)

Of course they do.

Jesus christ social media is poison. LinkedIn is the only thing I still use, and even that only with dozens of adblock filters in place to remove 80% of content from my newsfeed and never on mobile since I can't use adblock. Social media is modern day tobacco.

I clearly remember deleting my Facebook account years ago and today suddenly I saw email notification of someone's post. Had to reset my password and re-submit account deletion. What a bunch of slimy dickheads.

I honestly would prefer to talk to an AI customized to my personalty. I get erratic can change my mind and have get crazy ideas like the earth being flat etc. So if you had an AI you can just be yourself always without any judgement or repercussions. Even if that changes from day to day.