Opinion Recently, some netziens noticed “AI managed by Meta” bots on their feeds, remnants of the Facebook and Instagram owner’s 2023 chatbot initiative that was discontinued after low interest.
The profiles came with smiling pictures of happy families and a pitch for onlookers to ask them anything, to which the chatbots would reply. Meta hoped this approach would boost engagement figures and ensure Wall Street continues to view the social media giant favorably.
Although the initial AI fakes have now been pulled, they are a foretaste of what’s to come, according to the social networking behemoth. Meta, as you may have seen earlier in the news, intends to roll out interactive AI agents created by users that other folks can interact with.
“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 product for generative AI at Meta, told the Financial Times.
“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.”
It’s the wave of the future for Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, and the interview was published on the usually dead news day of December 26. Perhaps Meta was hoping no one really noticed, because this practice skirts the line between legitimate use of technology and possible fraud, in this vulture’s opinion.
After all, the original bots were offering advice on many occasions. Who is seriously going to take relationship advice from a bot, such as “Carter,” the relationship guide, or family advice from “Viv,” a “proud Black queer momma of 2,” and expect it to be anything other than garbage? But it doesn’t matter because the Facebook overlords got you to click, and that’s all that counts.
It’s a situation The Register warned about three years ago, but that was more about spammy articles overwhelming search engines. Now we’re going to face spam bots infesting social media, not just by outsiders but approved and promoted by management.
Meta’s not the first to do this, and it won’t be the last, but across its portfolios, it’s the biggest and probably the most influential social networking company on the planet. Sorry, not sorry, Elon.
It appears there was no way to block or mute the original bot accounts, although Meta claimed this was a bug and removed the profiles to fix it. And the cynic in me wonders how long that “AI managed by Meta” tagline would have lasted. Interestingly, the software agents were also in the US only, presumably either for testing purposes or because some countries take a dim view of such shenanigans.
Follow the money
Meta is, frankly, in trouble. Growth is slowing in its core Facebook and Instagram portfolios, Threads is about as popular as a rattlesnake piñata for many people, and almost no one cares about the Metaverse. But Wall Street demands growth in engagement and the sites’ use to carry on justifying holding or buying Meta shares.
It’s going to be interesting to see how convinced the financial community is on this – whether having people interact with bots counts as real engagement likely to prop up advertising spend. It might, but given the early backlash against the technology, it might not either, and ultimately, it’s all about the money.
One area of possible growth is in users crafting whole families or armies of AI characters using Meta’s tools, like some kind of Sims-on-steroids. The social network could devolve into bots communicating with each other, while humans are left only to view ads and spend money like Pavlovian consumers.
While this might make Meta and some managers more revenue in the short term, is it really a good use of either the social networks or the technology? Younger readers may scoff at this, but Facebook used to be a pretty good way of connecting with real actual human friends and finding old and new ones.
Then enshittification started to creep in, and now the site’s unusable, as has happened with many platforms. Google keeps reworking its search interface. Windows 11 bombards users with ads and crappy little doodles. The list goes on.
If you thought its social media platforms couldn’t get any worse, you ain’t seen nothing yet, but that might mean Meta’s doom. ®
