Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For

spotify: fake artists
meta: fake users
google: fake results
i see a large trend.
- Philip K. Dick wrote a short story ("Autofac") in which autonomous, self-replicating factories continue to operate and produce goods long after a global war has wiped out most of humanity, and they eat up all remaining resources on earth in doing so. I worry that there's a system in which a few extremely rich people can continue thriving without involvement of most of humanity, and that they're (knowingly or unknowingly) moving society in that direction. Who needs the commoners when AI and algorithms can simulate them.
  IIUC the calculation of GDP doesn't factor in whether the produced goods serve a human need - the system can in theory continue to optimize for ever-increasing GDP while every human on earth starves to death.
  
  IIUC the calculation of GDP doesn’t factor in whether the produced goods serve a human need - the system can in theory continue to optimize for ever-increasing GDP while every human on earth starves to death.
  There's an old joke I remember about economists and the GDP.
  Two economists are walking through the jungle and come across a gigantic pile of lion scat. One turns to the other and said I'll pay you 100$ to eat a bite of that shit.
  Being an economists and 100$ being worth a lot, the guy eats the shit and gets paid.
  A little while later they come across a pile of rhino dung. The now richer economist turns to the first and offers 100$ for him to take a bite out of this pile. 100$ is again a lot of money so he does it and eats the shit.
  As they're walking along, both picking their teeth, one turns to the other and asks "did we both just eat shit for nothing?" And the other days "of course not, now the GDP of the jungle has increased by 200$!"
  
  Correct; GDP is a dumb measure, and even its inventor said it cannot be used alone.
  
  Check out The Forever Winter, it incorporates the autofac into its world building.
  
  Who needs the commoners when AI and algorithms can simulate them.
  Being rich doesn't exist in a vacuum but only in relation to other people, meaning if only billionaires survive, they're not rich anymore. They need the poor majority.
  
  Electric Dreams did an autofac episode that was really good
- Amazon: fake products AND fake reviews
  
  90% of products in amazon are just marked up temu products lmao
- dead internet

They see Reddit pulling off having bots steer discourse and they're green with envy. I can't imagine it not being something like this

Dead internet theory was inevitable, but who thought Facebook themselves would bring it about?
- I mean, who else was gonna do it?
  
  if anybody can make a profit from enbottification, facebook wants to be the one to make that profit.

People who use it for business need to start think twice, imagine you saw your stats numbers and think you reach (example) 10000 people and 90% of them are bots but you paid for that 10000, worst is that you may think that your product is bullshit because of the success sales convertion its very low but bots dont buy products so either you have the info of how many bots have seen the add or you need to leave social media because its impossible to read that data to make decisions
- The executive team at my company was in shambles because no one was using the company intranet. So, they demanded that the company intranet be launched when a computer turns on. They were ecstatic that the numbers reached almost 100% in a day, even after being fully explained, and understanding, that the new traffic was, of course, not a real figure. All of the new numbers never went past the home page. Still, they patted themselves on the back, and partied.
  So I guess what I'm getting to say is more people either wouldn't care, or would even celebrate the fake data than one would think.
  
  Isn't that essentially how that whole scam called advertising works in general?
  
  The intranet at my work is a near-useless dumpster fire. Everything is disorganized, all the important documents and instructions are hidden behind completely chaotic branches and layers of creatively named folders.
  I have used the wretched thing only once. I instantly downloaded everything I thought I would ever need to an encrypted USB stick, so I would never have to use it again. This was 7-8 years ago. Everything important is always delivered by email and apparently stored to the intranet afterwards. The intranet has been hacked at least twice, but the real number is most likely much higher. For "reasons", all the personnel info has also been kept stored on the intranet, despite the successful hacks.
- I'm going out on a limb here and assume these bots don't count as an impression, but they will market it as an opportunity to show your ad to the followers of the bot account.
  
  The advertising companies would riot if they did count as impressions, so Facebook would either not count them as such, or hold off on them for that reason.
- It's basically video all over again.

People are still think social media is social. They think that when they post something, all their friends will see it.
In reality what each person sees is determined by the feed algorithm. They can use all the things they know about you and present you content that will press your buttons and change your opinion about topics.
The biggest issue though is to have a proper content. This is where generative AI comes in and this is why owners of social media are so much invested in it.
They basically have platform like the old MSM, except all content is specifically tuned to every person.
- The "likes by dead people" story broke in 2012. Ever since, I've been assuming that most likes for the stuff I've been posting, especially from friends I've not talked to in many years, are inorganic and inauthentic. Still I post sometimes because I know a few people actually do care about what I'm up to and we don't meet very often at all. Of course, I strip all EXIF data from my photos first.

Friends don’t let friends use Facebook.
- Facebook was a wonderful tool for me for quite a while. It let me build a digital list of my irl "friends" and then I got watch over the years as they posted their most vile and ill-conceived innermost thoughts.
  An excellent tool for seeing what people really think and feel when they're not "performing" in social settings. Curiously people don't understand that public posts to a public SM site aren't anonymous but there's enough separation from the "real world" that lots of people forget that.
  Just sitting back and watching gave me a lot of insight as to how awful people really are when they "feel like" they aren't being watched.

- Yep... A Sock Puppeteer's wet dream...

Facebook is near unusable now, the feed is 99% fake politically charged shit. I report it all as spam, promoting hate/violence/terrorism, and block the users, but a bunch more just show up the next day.
- This is me too. I'm still on Facebook for some family contacts and a couple of useful groups. Years ago I could spend hours a day there. Now I spend maybe 15-30 minutes each morning scrolling for friend/family updates and group content - and hitting "Hide all from ..." on every single bit of unsolicited content. I was reporting and blocking them, but I've decided it probably doesn't achieve anything and it was too many taps/clicks.
  Instagram is similar - I used to spend hours there too but now I only go to check if there's progress on one car build I'm following and scroll for maybe 5-10 minutes and I'm out for the day.
  
  The amount of irrelevant content that FB sticks in the default feed is just ridiculous. I'll get a couple posts from friends near the top, but as i scroll the ratio changes until nearly nothing is from friends or FoF. And it's all this garbage content that FB thinks I want to see, like I watch one cake decorating video and then more of them show up and keep showing up, and im not sure how to get rid of them.
  What you have to do is create feeds of your friends (and GD FB limits the number of friends you can put in a feed) and browse that instead.
  
  Keep doing it! My feed is almost entirely people I know or groups I've chosen. I've blocked probably hundreds of advertisers. Now it's like quarterly or so when they refresh their advertising scheme that I have to block maybe a handful more.
  
  https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/431970-fb-clean-my-feeds-5-02 makes you realize how empty the Facebook actually is.
- I use clean my feeds grease monkey script to hide it and only show my friends and groups I subscribed to and it makes it so easy to see how much of things that it shows is just their stuff and how dead the Facebook really is.
- You’ve described my limited FB experience. After refusing to join FB since the 00s, I joined FB a few years ago to get better access to the Marketplace. (Craigslist has gone to shit).
  I joined a few groups that interested me and then the constant political bombardment started in the more mainstream groups.
  Small niche FB groups are a night and day difference compared to some of the more contemporary groups I’ve seen.
  Bot algorithms definitely target large groups with lots of activity. The resulting increased activity due to algorithms just amplify it further.
  I just try to stick to my smaller groups to avoid all the mess.
- tbf, most posts on lemmy seem to be political as well.
  We'd need to regulate the share of posts of
  politics
  technology
  entertainment
  to be further on the side of entertainment and less on the side of politics.

"Spotify managers defended PFC to staff by claiming that the tracks were being used only for background music, so listeners wouldn’t know the difference [...]"
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
(PFC = "Perfect Fit Content", i. e. Fake Artists)
I have a feeling this quote exemplifies the attitude the management of these platforms have towards their end users, though it's seldom this explicitly formulated.

"We have 12 billion new sign ups this quarter alone! Now make our shares go up, please"

This is absolutely going to crash and burn for Meta. When companies look at the metrics for their posts on these platforms, they're going to see massive amounts of engagement, none of which converts into sales; and they're going to stop buying ads on those platforms thinking that their market isn't there.
Another example of AI being deployed in a place where AI is not useful; though in this case it's actually harmful to the goal of the company deploying it.
- Didn't facebook fake numbers before for video views which caused e.g. collegehumor to fold because they thought they could rely on facebook for views?
  
  Absolutely. And Vice and Gawker, and to some extent even The Onion. Some survived, some did not. Dropout in particular is one of the few semi-success stories of it. It was called the "pivot to video," and it's almost a joke in online content communities now; especially since everyone on these platforms was saying, "we don't want this!" even as Facebook was saying, "everyone wants this!"

Well they don't need us anymore, I'm going back to reading books.

Oh soo looking forward to content out of control! Already dislike the robofarming on YouTube with clips with voiceovers. Imagine nonsense content on Instagram…
- I don't care how hard to look at the (real) person is, I don't care if they sound like Janice Joplin, I will take that over the soulless AI read script any day. I did watch a few of these AI chans, as they had stuff I was interested in, but I just can't anymore, tone matters. I want to giggle at the real person mispronouncing words, stumbling (very briefly) over words (editing is a thing). I hope it doesn't get to the point I can no longer tell the difference, at that point I think I just quit the tubes
- Imagine nonsense content on Instagram…
  Isn't that all Instagram ever was? Out of all the social media platforms it was the one that was essentially fake from the start, just fakes produced by the users.
  
  You might be right! Souless microblogging.

Ugh. So glad I don't use FB. It's already so enshittified and only getting worse.

Great just like games like Fortnite and Call of Dity Mobile have bots with real usernames and profiles to fill lobbies, now literally everyone online could be a bot with a fake profile.
I’m prepared to just be gaslit for the rest of my life from now on
- When I played Fortnite the first time(not for long though), I was winning pretty easily in the first 5 matches or so. They put bots into it to fill the lobby and maybe because it hooks you more or something. But they don't tell you. That was a weird experience figuring that out.

Whenever I think it can't get worse

I want my laundry machine to figure out the best way to wash whatever I toss in automatically without an Internet connection. I guess I'm asking for too much :(

The only valid CAPTCHA test when you log in to that uncanny valley/horror: Is Kim Jong Un an idiot? Y/N

10 billion downloads on the Play Store.
- You don't think there's more Google accounts + phones + tablets + people changing phones, than population on Earth?
  
  There are, ~~but i cant picture 1 person with the same account over multiple devices~~
  I can... It makes sense... Mystery solved
- Number of downloads ≠ number of users. People with multiple devices, people who replace devices, and people who have to wipe and reprovision borked devices all inflate the number. I'd guess that, over the period that total has been running, we're looking at 4-5 downloads per user, if not more. Still a ridiculous number, but not that ridiculous.

Hot take: if they can get it to work, good! I welcome AI users who are smarter, better informed, and have better taste than the rest of us mouth breathing meatbags.
- AI users implies they are deployed and managed by the a company and can be configured to push ideas and agendas.
  This is quite a big problem imo…
  
  They will be able to steer entire cultures and countries without ever appearing as if they were sitting in the drivers seat. This is the social control endgame playing out in front of our very eyes. Why use violence to control people when you can subconsciously persuade with bandwagonning and peer influence by tempting people into parasocial relationships with AIs you control. Expect the AIs to offer real benefits, but with hidden catches. Like how rats are killed with 10% poison and 90% tasty treats, we will be steered to our doom by exploiting our desires and weaknesses and our inability/unwillingness to take into account the future effects of our decisions today. This is nothing new, it's just a larger, subtler, more wide reaching way of doing it.
- I admire your optimism
  
  More like stupidity