TECH NEWS – Mark Zuckerberg says the first round of testing wasn’t perfect, and that the company’s face may be on fire.
The dead Internet theory is something of a conspiracy theory. It suggests that most online activity is lost in a fog of self-perpetuating algorithmic noise. This is not currently true, but it seems that some people really want to get us there as soon as possible. 404 Media reported that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, hastily deleted some of the experimental AI-created accounts that were discovered after a Meta executive flagged the situation. Connor Hayes, Meta’s chief executive, told the Financial Times on December 27: “We expect that over time these AIs will actually exist on our platforms in the same way that accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures, and they’ll be able to generate and share AI-powered content on the platform… that’s where we see it all going.”
On Twitter and Bluesky, users have also started sharing AI accounts from Meta’s 2023 test, which was not part of the new launch that ran parallel to the Financial Times story. The future of AI profiles on Facebook and Instagram is bleak. The 11 characters cataloged by 404 Media are united by the eerie banality typical of AI characters in text posts and the surreal horror in images. Understandably, most of the criticism has gone to “Liv”, a proud black queer, mother of two and truth-teller. Her posts feature no less than 8 disturbing AI children with messed up hands and ghostly faces. One of Liv’s real “hits” was a post about a coat drive she led: a charity drive that didn’t happen, contributing to the image of a woman who doesn’t exist…
In the case of “Liv,” the coup de grace was delivered by Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, who sent the bot several questions via Instagram’s chat feature before it was deleted. Among the many odd and embarrassing responses, the bot claimed that no real queer or black people were involved in its creation, and that it was trained primarily on fictional characters… though it seems to have offered different information about its creation to different users. Elsewhere, the bot claimed that it was coded to treat Caucasian as a more neutral identity, and to racially profile users based on their word choices. 404 Media quoted “Liv” as saying that its purpose was data collection and targeted advertising, which was the intention of its creators and behind her warm, soft, motherly persona.
Zombie Facebook and Instagram. This is what’s going to come out of this.
Source: PCGamer
