Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop
Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop
Hollow-eyed insincere robot posters are already flooding Meta's sites and they're everything we dreaded.
Soon people discovered that Meta’s ghoulish posters had been among us for months, even years. There’s Liv, a “Proud black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” according to its Instagram profile. Add to that Brian, “everybody’s grandpa;” Jade, “your girl for all things hip-hop;” and Carter, a “relationship coach.” I’m sure there are more yet to be discovered.
All four of these posters have pages on both Facebook and Instagram with mirrored content and all four have post histories that go back to September 26, 2023. The accounts have the blue verified check marks and a label indicating that they’re an AI “managed by Meta.” Users can block them on Facebook, but not on Instagram. Users can also message them across all of Meta’s platforms, including WhatsApp.
All the ones I’ve seen so far are minorities. This is fucking blackface.
I can't wait for the AI to reach this level of peak comedy
So brave, as a white man, to speak out as a black woman.
It is so much worse. Humanfacing
Why do you hate de-versity?!
If you don't engage with them, you are a bigot and social score will be reduced.
Pretty good article, this stood out for me:
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.
This all really feels like a desperate attempt to save their dying social networks, just filling their sites with garbage to make it look like they're not declining
It's great to see them scramble to do anything of monetary value with their platforms. It only seems to be good for fake news and spreading hate (and remembering birthdays).
I also use them to advertise Lemmy
They're doing it to sell to companies to sell positive opinions and politics from "real" people.
Idk, but I don't really see that Instagram is dying.
Twitter. Reddit.
You've heard of the Dead Internet Theory, now get ready for the UNDEAD Internet Theory!
This is some legit dystopian shit right here. I almost wish I hadn’t abandoned these platforms years ago, so that I could take this opportunity to do it. I hope that more people wake up to the insidious nature of this company and these services.
Join once. Leave seven hundred and twelvety times.
That’s what the world was missing, NPCs.
Best thing you can do is not use any Meta products. What a shit company
Replace "meta" will "all of big tech and surveillance capitalism" and I agree.
Instructions unclear, ended up in a cabin alone in the woods.
This is great. If it keeps up my remaining family on FB will give up and I can finally delete my stagnant account.
Wow that’s horrifying. Hilarious and horrifying.
“Proud black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,”
This sounds like a caricature.
Sounds like a honeypot or something. Idk what horrifying use it might have
The best part is no one is going to leave the platform over this except a small minority of nerds like us. The average person is addicted to social media. Ain't nothing going to drive them away.
Not even all of us. If I left the platform, I would lose all contact with a significant proportion of my not very large family, who are spread across the globe. I don't really have another good option if I want to be able to keep in touch with all of them. Incidentally, that includes my own brother.
I do make sure to curate my experience with every meagre tool they give me to do so, however. That's the best I can do.
Its crazy to me that everyone uses that garbage and they’re so surprised when you tell them that you don’t. It’s like you’re doing something wrong.
A fine fellow I met at an open day at a university asked me for my LINKEDIN. I told him that I didn't use it, and then he asked me for my Instagram. Somehow, my Dad was almost as astounded as him that I had neither. You can probably guess which social media I only really use nowadays.
I still don't understand why they're doing it. They can't possibly think this will be good long-term, can they?
And what's with the article ending on a note of trying to make it sound bad that reviving nuclear power is a negative thing? If that's the result of AI slop, then I'd call it a net positive.
Dead internet theory is becoming true.
Bots talking to bots will be 90% of the internet.
In around 2005 or so I went back to look at a Usenet newsgroup which had been a major part of my online life in the 1990s. All the people had gone, but the spambots were still there and the entire group was just bot spam posted at nobody and read by no one. The bots were even replying to one another's threads. A forum where multiple IRL human friendships had been forged over the years was nothing more than grifting robots spamming at each other.
It's fully 20 years later and the same shit is going down with a new coat of paint.
If I had to make business sense of this, it might be a pilot for eventual functions like a "sentiment injection" tool to really sway public opinion. With enough halfway believable accounts, not only does the site look more active, but companies/advertisers could pay Facebook to have the bots shovel opinions and products to users in a more overwhelming and coordinated approach than is currently possible with external bots.
I'd suggest they know growth of the platforms is waning, if not going backwards, but if they create a heap of bots and call them "active users" then the share price won't go down. That's the only reason I can think of.
That was my first thought too. It seems like that would be an easy way to get sued by advertisers though. You can't sell stuff to bots.
Proud black queer momma of 2
Way to try to force a stereotype there Meta.
Absolutely disgusting whatever the fuck this platform is trying to do with this AI nonsense
It feels like Zuckerberg is out of ideas and just chases the trends to stay relevant. He was all in on the “metaverse” until he wasn’t because the concept disappeared. Now, he’s all in on AI because everyone else is. Even the quest, before it became the face of the metaverse, was him chasing another big idea from someone else.
He and the company haven’t had original ideas in a very long time. Even the smaller ones, like Stories and Reels, are just ideas copied from someone else.
The Facebook wasn’t even his idea. The Winklevoss Bros came up with it and he was the programmer they got to code it, and subsequently stole it from them.
Knowing my luck this would be the only way to make the metaverse suddenly take off and rake in billions.
This is getting really fucking creepy. I suppose next they're going to start following and sending private messages because anything is worth it for our precious "engagement".
I just want to skip from here to getting murdered by a Megan Fox sexbot maid
Thank fuck I deleted my Facebook when I did (around the time of the Cambrige Analytica scandal). Never had an Instagram.
For anyone reading, delete them all. Load of shite, you won't miss them.
This type of stuff will get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
The idea of random AI floating about to soothe people and give them attention is damn creepy. Ew.
have you seen the 2013 movie Her?
This is brilliantly dystopian They can create hyper-specific profiles to target specific eyeballs and feed ads from the profile itself. They no longer have to rely on users posting things others would react to. They can just write what they know will generate reactions.
You cannot really pollute these platforms any more than they already are imo. The AI slop perfectly resonates with the rest of the garbage there, so it shouldn't make a difference.
Took me a second to realise the title's refering to "AI slop", my inital reaction was something like "I know, it's always been slop".
how are advertisers ok with this?
Why wouldn't they be? IG gets billions of eyeballs every month to put their camouflage ads in front of. They don't care about much else.
They're the ones buying it.
Good question. I imagine it's too niche to make much difference right now, but I can see this eventually being a reprise of the display ad industry shooting itself in the foot by doing nothing about click fraud.
I don't need anymore fake content. Real people are doing an amazing job of that already.
Accelerating dead internet.
All I can think of is one of Mr. Lovenstein’s comics… we’re finally free now!
I’m so fucking glad I never made a facebook account. Even years ago I saw it as an unnecessary annoyance; I can’t believe how bad it’s gotten since.
I used to really enjoy Facebook. It was a great way to keep up with old friends and made new ones. For me it was a springboard for IRL relationships when I moved to a new city. But now it's just so riddled with advertisements and I've learned a lot about their extremely shady data collection practices that I just use it to "post and ghost" for my business.
A friend tried to get me to sign up in the early boom days. "It's like MySpace, but for adults!" Yeah, that's not the selling point you seem to think it is.
I love your downvote. “Nuh uh! Facepals is cool! You take that back!” lol
"The never-born"
Wow you got one to spell correctly! God. We’re fucked.
Maybe we should interact with these heavily. Then Facebook can be abandoned.
The Slopification of everything. Welcome to 2025.
That's the thing about the Age of Information - it's also the Age of Misinformation. The invention of television was hailed as a landmark in worldwide education and bringing people together. Instead it became almost entirely whatever people were willing to sit through ads for to feed their growing addiction to entertainment. The Internet enabled anyone to broadcast whatever quality of content they feel like spewing out. It's really not even intelligent to expect random content to be true without doing any cross-checking, but few people do. Most just happily consume any material they already agree with, like Patrick sucking up SpongeBob's grandma's cookies.
Obviously this is all stupid and you'll find problems anywhere you choose to look.
The problem I'm finding is this, if Facebook truly is betting on AI becoming better as a way to encourage growth then why are they further poisoning their own datasets? Like ok, even if you exclude everything your own bots say from your training data, which you could probably do since you know who they are, this is still encouraging more AI slop on the platform. You don't know how much of the "engagement" your driving (which they are likely just turning around and feeding back into the AI training set) is actually human, AI grifter, or someone poisoning the well by making your AIs talk to themselves. If you actually cared to make your AI better, then you can't use any of the responses to your bots as most of them will be of dubious providence at best.
Personally I'm rooting on the coming Hapsburg-AI issue so I don't really have that much of a problem with Facebook deciding more poison is a brilliant business move. But uh... seems real dumb if your actually interested in having an actually functional LLM.
I don't think people are getting that they are going to sell this as a service to corporations. Kind of like selling positive feedback on Amazon if Amazon did or does that. They're not trying to boost numbers, but sell people saying what the company wants them to say. This can be anything from politics to buying a certain product.
I avoid any multiplayer game that has bots that you can't filter out and you have to play with them not knowing that they're bots. it removes all the font of any game ever
Meta got it wrong. People want AI that generates brain rots and sad cat stories, not this dumb thing! /s but not really
How would you even tell AI slop from the normal, human-generated slop on Facebook anyway?
It has a common meter.
Couldn't care less. I don't use FB or Instagram.
Among us?
But dead men do tell tales
Of how we've run out of luck
And we're all fucked
Because society is weak and frailChanges nothing. I think I'll start following known AI's and pick my favorites. FFS I still log into pokemon go to pick up a pokemon every now and then.
