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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I think I had a seizure reading that. "AI" every 5 words, and I'm still not exactly sure what the product is. Best I can interpret is it's two separate products: One is a virtual person for "creators" to generate: it impersonates them, writes messages to fans on their behalf, and tricks their "audience" into believing it's the real thing, and the second is a virtual friend that you can create and then have a parasocial relationship with.

[EDIT to remove unnecessary snipe at the end]

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> "AI" every 5 words

That's not peak AI yet. Wait until "AI" is a verb (meaning to apply an AI to, or to ask an AI about) and an adjective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal... will have a sister article consisting of "AI" only.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/13/teching-the-tech/

Your comment hasn't been aied enough, I think.

Bots have been aing the comments section for months.

Or aiing?

Aye! Aie?

Had a great time reading that wiki, thank you

It's not that far fetched though, "google" is a popular verb.

But I don't think "AI" will be the word, I think it'll be a brand name that serves as a catch-all regardless of the brand you're actually referencing, like bandaid or kleenex.

True, you might Xerox copies but you wouldn't Kleenex your stuffy nose (though I've heard of someone bandaiding a cut before). Like Kleenex I actually think AI is slightly too awkward to say to become a common verb.

It makes for a great interjection. Ali G made a whole movie out of it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Ac2dpD2wM

Crowdstrike is a verb too now.

AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI

Mildly irritating that sentence will be slightly more “real” since buffalo don’t really buffalo

Vanessa da Mata - AI AI AI (Felguk & Cat Dealers Remix)[0]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgiWm5jxULs

AI AI AI AI AI AI.

i.e. Apple Intelligence AI Agents create new ai.town agents based on apple intelligence

AI (Apple Intelligence (adjective))

AI (artificial intelligence agents)

AI (proposed verb meaning "create with generative AI")

AI (https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town shortening of AI Town)

AI (Apple Intelligence (adjective))

AI (artificial intelligence agents)

AI is just the hot "trend" tech is riding the wave on, lets go back a bit:

- The Cloud

- Big Data

- Self Driving cars

- ML (same as AI but more about chatbots)

- AI -> I know when Matthew McConaughey is wearing a cowboy hat shilling AI for salesforce(do they even have any GPU clusters at all??) that we have reached the peak of this wave and its all downhill until the next trend is found.

Tbf, ML and the cloud are wildly successful and arguably very useful.

We’ve basically solved image recognition with ML techniques (including deep learning ones, which are now called AI, I think)

The cloud’s popularity and successfulness is self-evident if you follow the web space at all.

Neither of those were “just” trends. I think AI will follow in line with them. Obviously something useful that we will make extensive use of, but with limitations which will become clear in time. (Likely the same limitations we ran into with big data and ml. Not enough quality data and the effort of curating that data may not be worth it)

What's gonna be the next one? Probably something concerning the use of AI with extremely high utility, perhaps something medical

IoT is another one. And we are still in a SaaS wave.

Does this backfire? I don't want to have a fake relationship with a computer, and if "creators" on Meta's platforms are more likely to be fake than real, then I think I'm going to be not bothering too much with FB/IG anymore.

Sounds more like an optional way people can interact with the creators. Currently you can only send DM, spamming their inboxes, or reacting to a post. The creators won't be fake, but the interactions with their communities will be

OK, but my impression of Meta is even lower than it was before.

Until now, I didn't trust Meta, but I trusted the people & creators I connected with. Now I don't feel like I will trust anything at all on a Meta platform.

That makes me a lot less interested in using the platforms at all.

Probably shouldn't blindly trust any video on any platform at this point.

Shortly, you will not be able to trust anything outside your immediate perception.

That was always the case. The rest is a sales pitch.

That ship has long since sailed already. As other commenters in the thread pointed out, plenty of "online social media personalities" already hire dozens to hundreds of offshore workers to impersonate them in chats. When you have 10M fans, and let's say 0.1% of them want to chat with you all day, that's still 10K people.

I had a long conversation with an OnlyFans star a while back. One of the very surprising things that I learned was that she paid a very large portion of her earnings to a firm that outsourced chat and audience interaction to a mix of AI and real humans. Her fans never knew the difference.

There's a great podcast about a company providing an AI service of this.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/latent-space-the-ai-en...

I totally believe this.

If you look at a earnings screenshot of, for example, Bhad Barbie, she earned ~ $40 million in 2022. $15m from subscriptions and the other $25m from paid messages.

Paywall, but here's an article written by one of those chatters: https://www.wired.com/story/i-went-undercover-secret-onlyfan...

There's also a Reddit AMA by one, but I can't find the link.

Basically Ashely Madison's business model at scale.

Its an open secret at this point in that industry. People have done AMAs as people who maintain a string of whales for some fake persona like this. The only people not in on the joke are these whales who probably would refuse to believe it’s a joke even if you put the evidence in front of them.

One of the most important aspects of being an online influencer is their parasocial relationship between their audience, both the good (the relationship will cause people to interact with you more often, which converts into making more money) and the bad (the relationship may cause some people to think they're "owed" a relationship with the creator and act out with toxic behaviors).

A persona chatbot is one way for creators to benefit from the good and avoid the bad.

Do those fake users rack up ad impressions just like the real users they impersonate?

At first perhaps. Eventually, hopefully not.

You and I will just walk away.

But honestly I think this is going to mess people up.

Consider the awkward teenager, who rather than do the hard work of learning to meet people and engage with the world, can sit at phone and have what their brains perceive as robust relationships with internet friends who are actually just bots.

Yes, I can believe that some people will get sucked into this. It's sad, and Meta seems to be evolving into a Black Mirror-esque predator.

I still hope it backfires, though. Are awkward teenagers really a lucrative segment? Perhaps they can spend their parents' money initially, but eventually I think they churn or become not very profitable.

I hope you are right, but...

https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/d...

Idoru[1] is becoming a documentary.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru

Well if it causes problems, an AI therapist is just a subscription plan away. /s

BTW the problem you describe has been happening already for at least a decade. It's why many livestreamers effectively run a softcore channel, because they get more followers, interaction and gifts when they dress skimpy than when they don't.

This was the topic of a recent podcast I came across:

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/01/1247296788/the-benefits-and-d...

Opportunity for launching AI "fans".

Imagine an internet where AI creators talk to AI fans. And no one knows what's real.

This was my objection to even primitive AIs like Siri. I don't want to talk to computers, or treat them like intelligent beings in any sense, or have them scanning my documents, texts, and emails for appointments and travel plans. So at least in my case, yes that was a backfire for Apple, they spent a lot of money to acquire Siri and then further develop it and it's the first thing I actively disable when I get a new phone.

I do want to have a relationship with a Scarlett Johansson Operating System.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)

Creators have been using AI doubles for a while now, and that’s likely to continue expanding whether or not individual social platforms offer tools for it.

Well see, what AI you don't AI understand about AI is AI Studio helps AI the AI into the AI AI while you AI. It's very AI helpful to AI society and AI AI AI. Of course there are safety guardrails. AI AI AI.

Reminds me of that "We heard you like X so we put more X in your X" meme template.

Q: What’s that that tripod you’re using?

A: It’s my mobile standing desk

Is that really the kind of interaction anyone needs?

I've seen followers ask famous photographers about the camera they use. May be creators can use an AI bot to answer this kind of repetitive questions.

Except it didn’t even do that here but yeah, maybe.

That part is really weird to me. I saw a video from that person for the first time a few days ago. They did an unboxing of the Daylight Computer. I am waiting on my own order for the DC, so I found and watched it.

They aren't even that big of a creator (sub 5k subs on YouTube) but now I am seeing them in a Facebook ad. Weird coincidence.

It's no coincidence. Digital tracking and advertising from youtube.

It is a coincidence. I found out about DC from HackerNews and ordered it based on that. I found the video by searching "Daylight Computer" on NewPipe. Then he happened to be featured in a Facebook ad shortly after.

Thought the same about the Chicago style pizza. I've had many, been to a lot of the best spots in Chicago, and introduced many to their first Chicago style pizza. I've never heard anyone say you have to or should eat the crust first? What value does this offer?

Politicians and celebrities often don't write their own tweets. Hell they don't write their own books.

That said, it doesn't need to be deception. If you're a celebrity you might add a "me-bot" to your community page. It can be clearly a chatbot but stylized in a fun way that talks about upcoming events and what not.

Seems like a somewhat fun marketing ploy.

It sounds like it's a version of chatbots like Character.ai's little parasocial bots but on Instagram and Facebook and built for companies to use too not just for people to get freaky with. It's hard to tell because my work doesn't block the URL but does block all the JS and stylesheets served from the Facebook CDN.

Not sure if parasocial's the right word, though probably depends on someone's definition of what awareness is. This is more like a virtual or simulated relationship or something? I'm sure there will unfortunately be a very specific word for it in a few years' time.

it's just a continuation, on a much deeper level, of the bifurcation created by social media: some (most, at this point?) will spend their whole lives living in this fake world consuming what they think is reality, while a few, including those who _appear_ on social media the most, are out doing anything else.

this almost feels criminal/class warfare. it's freeing up even more time for the "Creators" to stay offline while keeping the masses locked in. welcome to the metaverse!

It kind of reminds me of that sarcastic Tweet (now seems taken down):

What's your favorite tech innovation?

- Illegal cab company

- Illegal hotel chain

- Fake money for criminals

- Plagiarism machine

I guess now we can add "- Fake friends for lonely people"

Ah don't forget:

- microplastics printer

- exploding car

- wiretap hockey puck

- illegal video streaming company

It's even worse than I thought after reading your comment!

It looks like they use the noun AI to refer to "personalities" or "entities" whose output (over social media networks, supposedly to be consumed by humans or other "AIs") is AI-generated.

It's frankly disgusting, especially coming from a large, influential company such as meta. Now all the kiddies will be talking like this.

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