'Counterfeit people': The danger posed by Meta’s AI celebrity lookalike chatbots

A "supposedly" whistleblower talked about this in detail. Meta was able to generate the whole life of a person from childhood to old age, and was able to simulate social media activities such as media posting, messaging etc.

I documented the original text here: https://twitter.com/prakgupta_/status/1630669890138025984

>these robots look like American jet-setter and DJ Paris Hilton,

The Black Mirror vibe aside, is there a genuine market for this? Is anyone going to spend their time chatting with the simulacrum of Paris Hilton?

To me this feels as stereotypically Meta as it gets. Technologically impressive but completely inauthentic, like their Horizon VR world that seems dead. If anything it seems like people flock to the exact opposite. Real human interaction even if the tech isn't realistic, VRChat, Fortnite, Minecraft are all more 'metaverse' than this stuff.

i remember when FB was making a fuss about real names; real people; and real account info. for thee but not for me.

So...other than the FUD-dy "It's An Artificial Human!" click-bait, is there any "Big, Bad AI!" danger here?

Vs., say, Meta just deploying a bunch of glorified-Eliza chatbots, with an army of ill-paid contractors in Nigeria trying to field the more difficult questions, and "jiggling the puppets" occasionally, to make Eliza v1.1 seem less simplistic?

Is this AI safety?

This video is incredibly long, dull, and lacking in any technical depth (as new product releases often are) but I watched Zuckerberg's keynote speech - the 45 minute-long one - and the engineering guy's speech in which he talks about LLMs because I work in the language models space and was hoping to hear more news about open-source LLMs and Llama2, Llama3, etc.: https://m.facebook.com/MetaforDevelopers/videos/meta-connect... (I wish that video were on a seek-able platform with a searchable transcript like YouTube.)

In any case, the digital avatars of famous people were introduced in Zuckerberg's keynote speech, along with the absurd RayBans+Snapchat camera sunglasses that now record and transmit audio (great...), as well as the third generation of their AR/VR headset. (It seems they're leaning heavily into the _augmented_ reality instead of a virtual world in the 'metaverse'.) Oh, speaking of the AR/VR headset: Xbox games are coming to it in December 2023. I didn't expect that: Microsoft and Meta joining up on an AR/VR headset.

As someone who works in tech in the United States, but who had previously lived in a country in the EU that is more privacy minded than a lot of other EU countries and is decidedly more privacy-oriented than the United States, I must say that the RayBan + Snapchat video and audio sunglasses thoroughly creeped me out.

This article touches upon but a few of the reasons why I do like those devices: https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Wie-Facebook... Yes, there's an application for hands-on learning with AR/VR goggles and it makes it easier to connect with one's friends and family on the other side of the world, but I don't want to exist in a society where everyone is wearing a potential surveillance apparatus on their face and where people interact with but a digital simulacrum of the real world.

I'm terribly curious as to if anyone has done market (or academic) research into these notions of 'digital avatars' of not-famous people since LLMs have grown in ability? I'd read some of the literature on the perceived helpfulness or utility in question-answering via digital avatars some years ago, but that was probably a decade or more. Can anyone recommend any recent research in the space? I'd also truly love to read any marketing-focused materials on this flavor of tech product as I'm just not convinced that there's a real market there for digital avatars / digital 'holograms' of real (live or dead) humans.

I fear Meta's AI chatbots are just uncanny valley totems. Just a publicity stunt or is there a market in GPT bots with personalities? The ones I've tried on poe.com lacked any interest or grit. Maybe they are useful as a gaming character or dungeon master?

I can see rowdy, unruly or perverse chatbots, bots that know who you are and act as your "bff", or anything that gives their unhinged opinion having a huge following, but that would be a product for companies which, for the time being, are behind a huge barrier to entry.