I’m not looking forward to just hanging out with my imaginary friends online that tell me what I want to hear.
They won’t. They’ll tell you what you want to buy.
That’s silly. Let us consume Coca-Cola and discuss this further.
Excuse me, but the shareholders asked for them. Those are the only voices that matter.
Considering the fact that there are still a shit-ton of people on twitter that supposedly despise twitter, I’d imagine this will do absolutely nothing to their user base.
Just in case anyone wants to train AI using “their” data.
I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is conscious. Maybe that’s what so off about him. I think he might actually be a philosophical zombie. He’s just a stimulus response engine without an internal sense of self. The lights are on, but nobody’s home!
Aspd comes to mind.
Facebook has invented bots decades after everyone else.
I admit I’m torn here. On the one hand I think the future is to have AI ubiquitous and integrated into everything. On the other hand, fake AI ‘friends’ on a friend’s network sounds hideous.
What are you torn about?
Hammers are good tools, but throwing them at people without warning is unequivocally bad, nothing to be torn about.
Oh, but it also means that with the help of a few bots, you can appear to have friends, while still being your normal introverted self. People who expect you to be a social butterfly, can continue to live under that illusion, and you don’t actually have to make any new friends in real life. I see that as a win-win for everyone.
Absolutely. And if your new friends just happen to be really into an ever shifting set name brand products and niche political opinions…honestly, yea, that is probably better than watching people you used to respect get sucked into yet another get rich quick scheme.
I have a feeling that Meta will try to make your new bot buddies harmless and inoffensive - two qualities that rarely coexist in meatbags.
I think they know their audience better than they do. It will take some tuning to work out the bugs, but eventually the AIs will be exactly what each individual expects their friends to be.
They will probably aim for that, but actually doing so will produce hilarious results. Imagine what would happen to someone who is into BDSM or some other spicy topic. Then meta would generate them a bunch of BDSM buddies that post all sorts of wild stuff all the time.
My argument is that as Meta matures, it becomes increasingly risk averse, just like large companies tend to. They might still try what you suggested, but after a few PR disasters they’ll tone it down a bit. Maybe after a few iterations, the bots will produce hilarious results as rarely as possible while still being just barely interesting. In other words: harmless and inoffensive.
I think they might just let the disasters happen. The end picture looks less like a social network and more like billions of individual humans floating in their own personal fantasy worlds populated almost entirely with AI friends.
Status update: it took only a few minutes for the backlash to happen.
As users began to sniff out some of Meta’s AI accounts this week, the backlash grew, in part because of the way the AI accounts disingenuously described themselves as actual people with racial and sexual identities.
source: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/03/business/meta-ai-accounts-instagram-facebook/index.html
Oh, now they have bots that are into all sorts of spicy stuff. Pretty much what I expected.
The current LLMs hallucinations and horror themed pictures have been pretty entertaining already. Sounds like there could be good times ahead if Meta lets the AIs run wild. 🍿
