Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles
theguardian.com
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CodeBot: Word tables blank sometimes. Hmm.
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sound = tts("Say again?") // constant, might as well cache
while(true):
phone.out(sound)
_ = phone.waitUntilNextPause()In other words we have a bona fide AI arms race between doctors and insurers with patient outcomes and profits in play. Wild stuff and nothing I could have ever imagined would be an applied use of ML research from earlier in my career.
Note: not saying these metrics are what would be used, just giving examples of antithetical heuristics that could play together.
The closest were:
- "In constant battle with insurers, doctors reach for a cudgel: AI" from NYT (via Salt Lake Tribune), 2024 July, which is mostly on doctors using law-compliant LLMs to draft prior authorizations and has a passing one-graf mention of insurers likely doing the same: https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2024/07/11/constant...
- "The AI arms race over your medical bill" from Politico, 2024 Jan., summarizing LLM use in coding, billing, and fraud prevention: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/future-pulse/2024/01/05..., linking to https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/31/ai-medical-expenses... and https://govciomedia.com/how-health-tech-leaders-use-ai-to-co...
Aside from that:
"Large Language Models to Help Appeal Denied Radiotherapy Services" from JCO Clinical Cancer Information, 2024 Sept. (abstract only; full-text paywalled) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39250740/
"The potential of large language models in the insurance sector", 2024 Feb. (commercial white paper), largely focused on "fraud detection" in claims: https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/potential-of-large-langu...
"IQVIA NLP Risk Adjustment Solution (undated commercial white paper), marketing pitch on using AI to improve coding accuracy and reduce chart review times: https://www.iqvia.com/-/media/iqvia/pdfs/library/fact-sheets...
I put that air quotes because insurance companies don’t actually provide health care. They provide insurance. That’s a financial product, not a medical one.
customer - insurer: the govt (or, far more rarely, the employer) is the customer
insurer - recipient: the recipient is you. You're really just a necessary but unwelcome side-effect.
I know 'pro status quo' people will say online anecdotes are all lies and not relevant, but there are a heck of a lot of people with a lot of animosity to the current system and it's 'for profit death panels'. I think it would be easier to swallow if it were societal chosen death panels over failed doctors (that can't make it so they go work for the insurance company) or random AIs doing the decision making.
To be fair, it's impossible to know of it matters :)
I moved back to Europe from the US. And I can certainly feel that healthcare is slower, less eager to jump and investigate everything.
But on the other hand, in the US you most certainly risk talking your self into procedures you don't need!
I was discharged the next day. I didn’t pay a cent. I didn’t even see a bill. I don’t think they made one.
I keep hearing stories from Americans about wait times in other countries. I’m sure it happens, but I’ve never seen it myself. My experiences with the medical system here has been pretty universally excellent.
When I was in America I was very impressed with how proactive everything is. My insurer paid for yearly physical exams. I’d never done that before. It’s certainly possible I would have even better health outcomes in America. But, I’m way happier here. And I’m a lot less stressed than I was when I lived in the Bay Area. That counts for a lot.
Outside of certain screenings, there is no proven benefit to yearly physical exams for healthy adults. It's a waste of resources and doesn't improve patient outcomes. Some people seem to want those annual exams, but they aren't justified on an evidence-based medicine basis.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/a-checkup-for-the-checku...
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
I was talking to a taxi driver in SF a few years ago. He said he was in a car accident once, and his car rolled and flipped upside down. The police & an ambulance showed up. Even though he seemed mostly ok they still wanted take him to hospital. But he couldn't afford the ambulance or the hospital - without health insurance, it would have bankrupted him. So he told them all to get lost.
In telling the story, he got kind of angry about it - I think he was mad how pushy the police and ambulance people were about the whole thing.
Thats vaguely horrifying to me. A man who was just in a car accident should never be put in a situation like this. If you're wealthy in america, yeah - you get top notch medical treatment. But I'm not sure I'd call that a successful system for emergency care.
The No Surprises Act did give many consumers significant protection against excessive ER bills.
https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/no-surprises-unders...
I live in Québec, Canada and my wife had breast cancer and her periodic scan happened at a 4 months interval. When they detected oligometastasis on her spine she had radiotherapy 2 weeks after the biopsy.
The only thing not covered by the gouvernement is a drugs called kisqali that sucessfully keep her alive (may it continue to works). If I did not had gold plated drugs insurances, the public alternative was weekly chemo (taxol or taxotere i dont remember).
It often goes unsaid, but America, on a cultural and political level, is really ideologically fixated on a distinction between working and non-working individuals, and, in a far deeper sense, whether an individual "deserves" healthcare or not. This makes access to healthcare intricately connected to class, wealth, and income, in America. That's why access to healthcare is seen as a product in and of itself. You can either afford it ("you've earned it"), or you go into debt for it ("you have to earn it"), or you simply have no expectation of ever paying for it ("you cheated the system").
The entire conversation is often dominated by these ideas in a way that often makes talking about healthcare with Americans baffling to people that come from many single-payer or universal systems.
TBH I think in the US it’s more than anything about how much more competitive industries here are vs in the UK. If X company feels it’s worth the extra cost by allowing unlimited PTO and 2 years of parental leave, etc. the worry is that X will be trounced by Y Company, who is ruthless enough to not offer those things and as such has much cheaper labor costs.
If you take an industry like retail, those companies have a point - Walmart and Amazon offer low benefits compared to what companies once offered. Their lower prices are part of how they killed off most of the department stores and put the rest on life support.
And if you think about a highly paid job, even though our fringe benefits suck compared to Europe style, my impression is that US salaries are higher for equivalent jobs, enough that it makes up for it. So we value the money more than we would the benefits, apparently. Only problem is you can’t use all that money to buy more time with your family (except for by taking breaks between jobs, if you’re good at saving!)
So the wealthy and insured are covered. The lowest rungs and those that don't care and will just run away are covered. It's mostly lower / middle lower class that this really hurts, ironically.
They're really not. They are only entitled to "stabilizing care".
I work as a paramedic. We have had situations with "frequent fliers" where when we've called the hospital to give a report as we are transporting, the hospital will say "let us know when you're here", and when we've done so, there's literally been a physician come out to the ambulance.
"Hey, X, what's happening?"
"I got a lot of fluid in my gut (he had ascites)."
"Okay, well, that's not new, and it looks like you have an appointment for having that fluid drawn in two days."
"Oh, okay."
"Anything else bothering you?"
"Nope."
"Alright, we're good then." Gives us a nod.
"We're going in then?"
"Uh, no. You have been by a physician, you're stable, you're good to go, you can jump off their gurney and head home now."
Which is harsh - but also this person at this point was being transported 4+ times _per day_.
But EMTALA only requires acute stabilizing care, not definitive management.
In my opinion, this is actually the reason for why we have so little innovation in Europe.
Mandatory, single-payer insurance very significantly raises the cost to be self-employed / have a sole proprietorship, which you practically need to run any side project that you want to eventually make money from. This means that if you launch a startup, you either need it to be profitable on day one, or you're vasting significant amounts of your money, not just your time.
This is true.
> This means that if you launch a startup, you either need it to be profitable on day one, or you're vasting significant amounts of your money, not just your time.
This is a false dichotomy. First of all, even ignoring health-care, you're still spending money on housing, food, electricity etc. If you're not employed and your startup is not profitable, you're paying money out of pocket to live.
Second of all, even in the USA, you are still going to pay for health insurance even if you are currently founding a startup. You could argue you are allowed to gamble that our health is good enough that you don't need health insurance for a few years, but that's just tossing coins. You could just as well not pay your taxes in the EU for a year or two, and gamble that the authorities will not catch on right away.
If you have literally no income (or your income is entirely "off the books"), then you qualify for medicaid; everything is covered with no premiums, copays, or deductibles. At a middle-class level of income, you're probably looking at either a comparatively shitty ACA marketplace plan, or a comparatively shitty employer-provided HDHP plan. At an upper-class level of income, you can afford top-of-the-line healthcare.
The US government spends a similar amount of money per person on healthcare as other western countries do. But unlike Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan and so on, people don’t even get free healthcare in exchange for all that tax money. The system is deeply flawed. I don’t know anything about the Japanese healthcare system, but I’d still choose to be sick in Japan than America any day of the week.
It cost about 25% of US prices to fly to Costa Rica, stay at a resort, and get the procedure done in a top notch facility. And that's if you just need 1 root canal and crown. If you need even more done the savings move closer to 90%.
And that is a really nice places. You could drive to Mexico and get it done at a decent place for comparatively nothing.
As a citizen of a country with socialized health care, I will tell you the politicians promise the world but when the bill comes they can't seem to find their way out of the room fast enough.
The only way to avoid this adversarial relationship is to pay for it yourself. No insurance, no government, nothing. That means vast amounts of people will not be able to afford even a doctor's private practice.
It's sad but the bitter truth is nobody really wants to pay for other people's health care either. They only say they do because it wins them votes or clients. They all can't leave the room fast enough when the bill actually comes. Politicians have other far grander things they'd rather do with all that taxpayer money, and that's when they're not corrupt and pocketing it. Insurers obviously want profit. They're all betting you won't actually need all that fancy schmancy health care they promised you. They're literally banking on it.
In my experience, people barely want to pay for their own health care. They "want" to but start appealing to the altruism of their fellow man the second the bill comes. In my country, doctors are shamed every day because of our "oath" to help others. People act like we are their slaves, not even entitled to payment for services rendered. The good doctor is the one who pursues medicine as a hobby, who walks the earth helping others in need, with no needs of his own to tend to. The good doctor somehow absorbs the costs of it all. Including the costs of the cures involved. Especially the opportunity costs.
People are not prepared for the soulless utilitarianism of public health care. The bitter truth is there aren't enough medical resources for everybody. You must pick and choose who gets that fancy MRI scan. If you pick right you kill people. If you pick wrong you kill even more people. You have hundreds of millions of citizens, how do you help as many as possible as much as possible with the resources available? Decentralization via hundreds of basic clinics and hospitals turns out to be better than centralizing everything into one well equipped giga hospital. It's not about any one guy. It's about saving costs now so that you can help more people later. That's what primary care is all about. Saving costs, by promoting healthy lifestyles which means less sick people later in life where treatment is more expensive. It's about money, about resources.
But people don't want that. Good lifestyles are hard to lead, they require sacrifices. They want to do whatever they want, then go to the doctors when they get sick, then they want others to pay for whatever's necessary to fix it, and they want it fixed good as new. They are like consumers who don't want to pay for the services they need. Nobody wants to pay for it, even the people who directly need the services.
I realize that there's no magic solution to perverse systems like this, but it really bothers me nonetheless.
An iPhone 16 pro battery appears to have about 18 watt hours. So approximately 100x less then a human uses.
The engine came up more favorably.
Turns out, eating any meat and industrial agriculture transportation are really heavy.
For example this study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66170-y.
> our estimates suggest that the net emissions associated with the ‘fuel’ required for driving, walking, and cycling may be comparable in some settings
With the caveat that they're looking at *per-mile* emissions, and nobody in the developed world is walking 60 miles to and from work every day.
However there's an important clarification to your recollection.
- You're correct that eating meat (and dairy) is very carbon-intensive.
- You're not correct that agricultural transportation is significant. It doesn't even make it into the paper above, as far as I could find. Agricultural transportation, even things like flying blueberries to California from Chile, is negligible compared to the carbon cost of food.
You can see that in the following graph. Red is transport. You have to look closely even to see it. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
He would sometimes pull up next door with a half dozen tote boxes overflowing with medical records. He would say "hey, dataviz1000, can you help me get these into the house?" He once asked me if I wanted a new job helping him go through all the charts. I don't get involved with illegal activities and I was earning more not breaking the law elsewhere. He did hire a young woman who graduated law school and was still working on passing the bar. Since they have married and started a family.
Yes, HIPAA laws got broken! Yes, this guy made 10s of millions in a few short years.
There are no good guys in this story.
Probably would make a good start up using LLM and bringing the process into compliance with HIPAA. There is probably several billion dollars in insurance companies that have been under billed.
HIPPA carves out this exception for using your health records:
“To pay doctors and hospitals for your health care and to help run their businesses”
It isn't difficult to bring the process into compliance. I offered to make an app which would have been easy because there was a predefined workflow that can be diagrammed on a sequence chart in about 10 steps. There were a couple interactions between the lawyer and the doctor. Then a step where the insurance company is notified. Then a lawsuit filed if not paid. At one point, I was researching how to store data in HIPAA compliance in the cloud. It was about 2 years later when AWS provided HIPAA compliant EC2 instances. I offered to build the app for $10,000. Having random people pour over private medical charts and undocumented and haphazard communication between the lawyers, insurance company, and doctors through email and text messages was a mess.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...
I don't think so. The "paying" part is important - the neighbour becomes an employee for the duration of the work, which is fine, as then there's a contract between the employer and employee which includes, even if only implicitly, that the employers data is not to be exfiltrated.
If he were simply sharing it with his neighbour for shits and giggles that would be a different story.
[0 https://www.medicaltranscriptionservicecompany.com/blog/what...]
And yes, I think the lawyer does know more than you.
And it's not necessarily a HIPAA violation to outsource medical billing and chart review as long as there is a proper BAA in place, and everyone follows the Security/Privacy Rules. Many small provider organizations pay outside services to ensure they bill at the highest allowable level.
Checked with a doctor and they said the same and couldn't puzzle out a benign misunderstanding that was right - they pointed out that even if you meant the lawyer sued if the insurance company refused to pay, the economics would be all fucky on the splitting, because now the lawyer does have to go to court, no automated easy money, much less millions.
I searched for "how long does a doctor have to bill you in florida" and the a top result was this gem, "A doctor in Fort Lauderdale I saw in 2020 contacted me to tell me that there was a /"billing error/" 3 years ago that they now want paid. What can I do?" That sounds about right.
I don't know the specific details about the lawyer was doing.
Now this is a really scary application of AI, but you won't hear those wanting AI regulation such as Musk complain about that, right?
Without it, health insurance companies would have every incentive to do what car insurance companies do -- buy profiles and records from third parties and use those to adjust rates and willingness to insure.
E.g. the obvious step of buying genetic information from 23andme, because it isn't covered by HIPAA
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/g...
Instead of regulating only some of the uses.
HHS already had to administratively extend to cover gaps (we'll see how that goes, post-Chevron) and Congress attempted to repeal it for workplace purposes in 2017.
And there's still the gray market question about 23andme -> Equifax-alike packaging it into a blended proprietary risk score -> insurance companies using that (of course 'without knowing that genetic information was included').
Make healthcare insurance be actual insurance: as in, not a gateway to treatment conditions that are entirely lifestyle driven.
Once patients are responsible for the bill and the large middle layer admin crud is taken off the table, medical inflation almost disappears. Take this example of a for-profit facility vs non-profit hospitals [1]
Ideally this happens once environmental factors are fixed or drastically reduced so diet and lack of time are "choice-driven" instead of "needs driven" as health determinants (you do have subsidies at the lowest end, but that cannot go on forever).
https://www.openhealthpolicy.com/p/cash-providers-cheaper-su...
I've personally had postural issues that were for many years simply attributed to poor discipline. It later turned out that I have a connective tissue disorder that was destroying the joints in my body.
All you I can see your proposition doing is giving insurures another reason to decline potentially legitimate claims. Your case would be more rational if you were arguing for no insurance at all.
It's not that hard. In the example you've given you could sue the doctors for misdiagnosis, or if research showed that a condition had been mislabelled, people would receive compensation. It doesn't seem any more onerous than any of the other negotiations over conditions and treatments that go on in any medical industry and legislature anywhere in the world.
Does having one vice deny a person for life from having coverage for any disease which my potentially be caused by that vice? How long must a person partake in this vice to be denied coverage for life (i.e. is it okay to smoke for a few years then quit?)
Your example also has the problem of measuring the "lifestyle questions" being presented. How would you prove a person isn't exercising enough? If I know it will get me denied I'm not going to self report. We would need some sort of invasive "health audit" industry to insure compliance with insurance requirements. A physical exam at the start of insurance doesn't solve this, because like I said, the existing issues could have been caused by any number of problems.
Your dismissal of my specific example is silly - I don't want to sue a doctor for misdiagnosing a relatively common issue. Connective tissue disorders are not that rare, and I'm far from unique. Do you want to live in a society where we have to fight tooth and nail to get basic care for problems on the basis that we might have caused them ourselves?
That is just not the case, and I shouldn't have to point out such basics on HN.
> A physical exam at the start of insurance doesn't solve this, because like I said, the existing issues could have been caused by any number of problems.
And yet I have to… People do a thing called "collecting data", on a large scale, and then they apply the lessons learnt from that data to calculate statistical risk. An imperfect system but, strangely enough, very effective (when not interfered with, as in the US health system).
Of course, you are welcome to open a car insurance company and offer everyone the same insurance for the same price and watch as young men and previously uninsurable people flock to your service. Maybe you'll get lucky and won't have to pay out more than you take in. All the best with that.
> Your example also has the problem of measuring the "lifestyle questions" being presented. How would you prove a person isn't exercising enough? If I know it will get me denied I'm not going to self report.
And then the insurance company can decide what level of fraud it will tolerate (something HN has discussed previously[0], and the linked article[1] is enlightening) and thus adjust its costs, and perhaps premiums.
> Your dismissal of my specific example is silly - I don't want to sue a doctor for misdiagnosing a relatively common issue.
If it's not a problem then don't sue. If it is, that is what the court system is for (or whatever system doctors and medical companies would put in place to avoid going to court).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
I personally feel uncomfortable labeling these as lifestyle choices to drop insurance liability. Alcoholism isn’t really the same as skiing.
Statistical methods can be used to assess the risk of each.
> I believe it’s pretty widely accepted that some component of addiction and substance abuse is genetic / hereditary. The same is true of depression.
High risk people should:
a) have most costly insurance against those things
b) be given help to avoid those things, which
c) could be used to reduce the cost of their premiums
Men are more prone to violence and also more likely to be victims of violence, and this is largely biological (hence the huge disparity between the sexes) - would that be some sort of excuse? Should men and women pay the same for the same relevant insurance even though they present wildly different risks of both perpetrating and befalling violence? That would be unfair.
I'm firmly in the "you are responsible for your life as an adult" camp. From a family of smokers thus making you more likely to be a smoker? Don't smoke. History of alcoholism in your family? Don't drink… need I go on?
You wouldn't even need too much surveillance to do this. Give people a yearly "fitness checkup" to encourage physical exercise, monitor weight to encourage healthy eating habits, do periodic drug tests to discourage drug use etc.
If you combined this with a (privacy preserving) fitness band that would monitor your vitals, and only send a list of premiums you're eligible for, you could do even better.
You'd have to account for preconditions that make it hard/impossible to exercise, but this would work for most people.
Sometimes the bank interface will tell you name and address, after you type in numbers, but who validates this?
My bank (in Denmark) sometimes sends me emails from an domain that isn't their primary domain.
The bank uses a login system that is provided by the state. In theory it's a good idea, but you sign-in on domains that are not owned identity authority. Like I sign-in on the bank website, instead of sign-in by redirecting from the bank to a trusted domain owned by the identity authority (how like OIDC flows usually work).
Sure the login flow still involves an app, but my point is:
There is a lot of bad practices around. These should incur liability.
Just start looking at what domains emails are sent from. And complain if they are not the primary domain of the entity contacting you, you'll get tired real soon.
It's just old fashioned con man stuff but over email or phone. And of you're dumb enough to believe that the only way the IRS (US tax agency) is willing to accept payment is by Visa gift card (and yes this is actually a common scam here) it's just not your bank's problem.
Pay your taxes by Visa gift card. Then you’re a blood idiot.
If I make a payment using my visa card, how is it that I'm not just redirected to visa.com, and that's the only place I enter card credentials? Like how OpenID works.
I'm sure there are reasons, probably legacy reasons :)
But it's still weird that payment uses a third-party domain I can't verify. Often called something sketchy.
The way these scams work is to get someone to intentionally send money, usually through gift cards or wire transfer to an account.
Some of the common schemes are to pretend these are taxes that they didn't pay ("you owe the IRS a huge amount, send this money and all the penalties won't be applied immediately"), sometimes it's urgent money needed for a loved one (a common one is "your son/daughter just hit someone with their car, send money to this lawyer to try and save them from prison"), sometimes it's promises of future riches (such as the infamous Nigerian Prince who will send his fortune to you if only you send a little money first).
Requires the person to want to do that though.
I’m in DE and have filed a criminal complaint about a company that runs fake personal ads targeting the elderly:
When an elderly person calls, they schedule an appointment at the person’s home. Then, over several hours, they talk them into signing a 3,000 EUR contract for an objectively useless service (getting contact data of 7 or so random people over a period of several weeks).
The guy running this scheme has been doing it since the 1990s. We know they did > 40 Million Euros in the last 10 years alone.
We filed the complaint a year ago and police and district attorney have done nothing so far. At the same time, the criminal himself has sued journalists who have covered the story multiple times.
Seems like the criminals are more resourceful than those who are getting paid to stop them.
I also think it's extremely simplistic to call the people making the calls "slaves". A lot of the time, they are in facr the perpetrators. Even when they are part of a more organized operation, they (1) are likely paid per successful scam, so they are co-interested in hurting you, and (2) fully aware they are scaring and stealing from someone.
So I wouldn't call these people slaves, I'd call them low-level criminals.
I guess this has something to do with my phone number starting with +38 and that nobody actually calls their relatives by mobile phone anymore
This is probably true, but the AI almost certainly hallucinated these facts.
You dont need a black American engineer or product manager to say “I approve this message” or “halt! my representation is more important here and this product would never fly” as they are just not person the data set was trained on, even if you asked an AI to just create the byline on the profile for such a character
its weirder, and more racially insensitive, for people to be vicariously offended on behalf of the group and still not understand the group. In this case, the engineer or product manager or other decision maker wouldnt have the same background as the person that would call themselves “momma”, let alone it not mattering at all, if you can regurgitate that from a training set
In which, ironically, the bot called it a "glaring omission"
its acting aware and sensitive but only has information about the tech sector as a whole
my critique is about how the standards being applied are dumb all the way down. the standards are not actually that enlightened even if there was more representation congruent with the race/identity being caricatured as representation. nullifying the whole criticism.
the training set is the only thing thats important with a language model. and its just a symptom of dead internet theory, as even the persona’s byline was probably generated by a different language model.
And we have come back full circle
It seems designed to piss off everyone.
The clash of these characteristics is what defy and define these unlikely odds.
This is trolling rage bait. Like most big corp content.
This is birthday paradox logic, not census logic
I haven't reviewed the context of all 28. But if "the team" were trying to do this rationally: perhaps they'd use census data to weight human characteristics and roll 28 dice. We might not expect more than one of 28 to end up as "queer black mom" but it's not necessarily "woke bait" or "rage bait" for one of 28 to land on those squares. Perhaps it was a logical way of assigning traits?
Honestly, I don't think meta can go any lower from this point in order to get the user engagement with their silly plaything that facebook has become.
Yes, the first interactive synthetic pop culture icon is probably the Vocaloid Hakune Mitsu, circa 2007, and she has lots of fans who know exactly who and what she is. I am not surprised Meta wants in on the "influencer" action with synthetic personas: no commissions to be paid, they can create a persona for every possible niche for a marginal cost.
The technology is not there yet, we've barely progressed from Tay in terms of corporates' ability to prevent their AIs from saying things that cause bad PR. AI is definitely coming for influencers, the economics are just too good
I would think that the obvious use of AI Facebook profiles would be to train them on someone who actually existed in the real world. Take someone like Jimmy Carter, train an LLM on everything he's ever said, and then let people interact with that.
But I imagine there are legal reasons they can't do this?
They aren't claiming that what the AI said was fact. It seems your hate comes from lack of understanding.
If they want to put AI EVERYWHERE then they don't get to hide behind "their output is not to be taken seriously" afterwards.
I'm not sure we get to both complain that bots are trained by "white males" and at the same time complain that big tech abuse H1B visas for cheap compliant labourers.
There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'd argue it's because the honest human desire that drives a product dies or is refined out of initiatives by the time it gets through the optimization process of their org structure. Nothing is going to survive there unless it's an arbitrage or using leverage on the user, and the things that survive are uncanny and weird because they are no longer expressions of something someone wants.
These avatars ticked all the boxes, but when they arrived, people laughed at them because objectively they were bureaucratic abominations.
Because AI is the hype thing and adding AI to your thing makes the stock price go up, because investors and stock evaluators don't know what AI is, nor do they care. They just know it's the hot thing and what you put in your product to make it look better to Wall St.
Meta AI, Google AI summaries, Apple Intelligence are all hilariously half-baked features designed to connect users with ChatGPT so the line goes brrrrrrr. Them being helpful, useful products that solve problems for users is a distant, distant next place to that.
I loaded them all up into NotebookLM.
I started asking it questions after uploading it all to NotebookLM like I would if I were starting from scratch with a customer. It answered the questions with citations.
And to hopefully deflect the usual objections - we already use GSuite as a corporate standard, NotebookLM is specifically allowed and it doesn’t train on your data.
One of my goals with my project I ended up taking on was to match/exceed NotebookLMs feature set, to ensure that an open source version would be available to people for free, with ownership of their data.
I'm not saying that as a slight or an insult, but right now the screenshot looks like a Gradio space someone would use to prove out the underlying tech of a professional product, not a professional product (unless you literally mean professionals are your target users as opposed to consumers).
I think an LLM would be able to very quickly tell you what most product builders would tell you at this stage.
-
Also one of the key enablers of NotebookLM is SoundStorm style parallel generation. Afaik no open source project has reached that milestone, have they?
SoundStorm/Podcast creation is one of the big draws, but I would question as to whether its one of its most-used features, considering hallucinations and shallowness.
> SoundStorm/Podcast creation is one of the big draws, but I would question as to whether its one of its most-used features, considering hallucinations and shallowness.
You're questioning the one single feature that drove its entire success in distribution? Most people don't know any features except the podcast feature.
If your goal is to address the more underlying concept of getting across knowledge in a quicker more readily absorbed format using LLMs, there's already an insane amount of competition and noise.
The podcast thing was the only reason NotebookLM cut through that noise, so the question shouldn't be "is it one of the most used features" (due to the way conversion rates work it will be btw, it might not be the most used feature by people who stay but obviously the feature that's highest in the funnel drawing people in will be your most used feature) but imo the more relevant question is "is it one of the most important features", and the answer is yes.
Thanks for sharing your perspective though, I will keep it in mind. I disagree regarding podcasts being a ‘big thing’ past the initial honeymoon phase. I do think that custom generated audio is also a big thing and the podcasting is the first exposure a lot of people have had with that level of quality, and since it’s free and everyone already has a Google account, it makes it much easier for it to viral.
That’s roughly the implication of my original comment. Many developers, including you, have a higher standard. I’m not gonna use something that looks like an intern slapped a few REST calls together with MUI.
It’s 2025 dude, I can build that in an afternoon. They have to take the product a lot more seriously.
Google’s lack of taste on this front will be the success of another competing product (perhaps even yours).
This is a really nice insight. I hadn’t put it together this way before. It’s similar to design-by-committee, or movie script-by-committee (like Disney-era Star Wars movies, or a Netflix focus-group-driven script). The layers of bureaucratic filter have rubbed off all human influence, and all that’s left is naked profit motive.
The worst thing IMO would be if LLMs became able to convincingly fake these emotions. They’d become emotional pillows for the inhuman manipulative ambitions of their parent orgs.
You get into a room with a bunch of key execs who are not part of your project and then they tear your product/movie/idea apart.
You don’t have to implement any of their suggestions but since these are seasoned execs they see flaws readily.
The key is that the process encourages candid feedback without hierarchy or defensiveness.
This goes on for a couple of iterations until the idea is ready for production.
I think Apple has something similar.
Those types of folks are not representative of most tech C-Suite denizens.
I find this insight so frustrating though. Isn’t that exactly what upper management is supposed to be doing and what they’re paid for after all?
It doesn't scale. That model hasn't been utilized at Pixar lately - whatsm was the last good/hit Pixar movie that wasn't a sequel or side-quel? Like most companies, Pixar relies on a few great products or ideas, and then doubling/tripling down on them, to make sure the graph grows up and to the right for shareholders.
This is fiction though. Perhaps we didn't forget about that fake thing and we're critiquing this real thing that exists. How can you take a demonstrative position on "what we're going to use them for" and defend it with someone's contrived story?
> because objectively they were bureaucratic abominations
Yes, this is why criticism of this real thing isn't countered by claiming people "forgot" what occurred in a fantasy script about things that don't exist.
for the people who get it fiction is a public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary would be like watching golf and thinking it's random. there's a literal mindedness or incapacity for abstraction I can't apprehend in that.
This is not to totally discard fiction as a way of reasoning. With regard to hypotheticals beyond our current reach it is often the only way to reason. So it's valuable, but we have to keep in mind that a story is just a story. Hard experience trumps fictional logic any day. And I can't assume that the same events in real life will lead to the same outcomes from a story.
Yea I love fiction. I certainly get it.
You should think this way about a particular thing because this one movie portrayed it that way, and if you don't it's because you forgot that this movie portrayed it that way according to its creators will, thoughts, ideas, motivated reasoning, worldview, whatever...is not compelling.
It's pretty obvious to me that the creative choices and ideas of certain people do not imply any demonstrative truth about reality just because they exist because there is not a direct connection between the two; someone can write or film or render whatever they want, even completely contradictory versions of the same topic. What if for example someone did watch that or any other thing and simply disagreed? Think the creators got it wrong?
> public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary
It's not arbitrary. It can certainly be self-serving, it can be propaganda, it can be a good guess or a well-meaning statement about reality, or speculative fiction but also wrong. It's just the emphatic certainty in how you presented this media creation as proof of something inherently connected to truth about a complex future debatable quality of reality, as even a fictional account about history or the present day or politics suffers from obvious fundamental disconnects from being regarded as "truth", proof or evidence of anything. Again, different people can make multiple contradictory or competing portrayals of a certain concept or topic. This is no different than someone telling you what they believe about a thing; it's not "therefore true" as such, especially in the form of a prediction about the future.
someone says to you, at least the fences will keep them in. and you say, "what fences?" and when they say, "didn't you see jurrasic park?" your answer is, "why would I see that, it's fiction, and who cares it's just a 90's kids movie"
that's how dumb I'm saying this release was.
I think a lot of people are reacting to this are missing some of the point - fictions may not literally model reality, but what makes certain fiction memorable is it shines light on some under-expressed aspect of reality, which sticks with us when we encounter a similar pattern in our lives. Whether its also serving entertainment purposes or the author's pet peeves is beside the point, because that is not the part of the fiction to be taken seriously.
We have all sorts of relevant quotes about this:
> all models are wrong, some are useful
> truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations
> We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. - Picasso
Aside from the obvious perception-is-reality aspect of fiction, it's especially important to take fiction seriously these days because the tech world is eyeing the many gray areas between fiction and reality as the next frontier for expansion. These avatars are a perfect example of this attempt to acquire more of the territory of human experience; not just the material reality but the many possible directions our hearts and drives may take us. If we dismiss fiction as something to take less seriously than 'reality', rather than something to be understood in a different way than rational analysis (and with its own skill tree), then we cede this territory to those that know how to wield it against us.
Sometimes its fun, but mostly it's stupid.
I'm listening to "Masters of Doom" on Audible. It's about the creation of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. Great book.
Something that's interesting about it, is that Id Software seemed to largely reject the idea of having a game where the players 'connected' to the characters or the story. They were laser focused on:
* Carmack creating a game engine that was the best in the world
* Romero and crew making the gameplay as fun as possible
But it sounded like they had folks on the team who wanted to make a story where the players could 'connect' with the protagonist. He was fired.
Some dude named "Tom."
Facebook, weirdly enough, seems to have the issue. Which is particularly odd considering that's their product!
I haven't played games in ages, but when I saw "Half Life" for the first time, it felt nearly as "revolutionary" to me as Wolfenstein 3D was.
Tom wanted elaborate lore and story-telling, while the rest wanted to make the game experience what the player connected to. The instant reaction to your input, seeing your bad-ass character (and by extension yourself) inflict awesome damage on the world.
This to me is more of a conflict of _what_ the player should connect to, as opposed to not wanting the player to connect at all.
"When we have more users engagement goes up, let's just _make more users_".
The reason he never looks happy is because he is never happy. Same with his fellow oligarchs; they can get pleasure in bunches but never happiness, they can be smug but never have peace. Happiness is what happens as a result of your helping others become happier; there is no shortcut, there is no other way.
Zuck has only ever worked for himself and his "peers". History is riddled with those losers, the richer the worser. It is not just human nature but the nature of the universe vis a vis our human responsibility as choosers of goodness or its opposites.
Zack has a comic on a similar concept:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-11-18
Of course, the exact line of reasoning doesn’t quite work for the different formulation you stated. However, a different version of the line of reasoning seems to? How does one help another person become happier if helping another person become happier is the only way to become happier? One helps them help someone else to help someone to… ?
Or, I suppose if it is possible to be more or less unhappy for other reasons, so by helping another person become less unhappy (though not yet happy) one could thereby become happy?
We are rewarded for our efforts, not their effects. If we truly try to help someone, we get some measure of happiness for our attempt, even if they refuse it or are otherwise miserable. When I tell someone to care for others' happiness, I do so in order that they do not sow the seeds of their own unhappiness. If they use their free will to ignore my recommendation, I do not lose for their choices; in fact, I've gained because I tried to help them make choices that will increase their peace and happiness. We cannot convince anyone to not be (for example) a racist, but when we engage in such efforts, we have tried to make the world a better, less miserable place, and we gain for our valiant attempt.
The intention of our ethical karmic universe is to nudge us towards caring for others, instead of being selfish aholes callous to the misery of others. The feedback mechanism is our resulting inner peace and happiness (or lack thereof).
All our choices start with an intention, however muddled or unconscious our thought process is at the time. When MZ chooses profit over policing his platform, he has planted bitter seeds, indeed, for we all reap what we sow, for good or ill.
> Or, I suppose if it is possible to be more or less unhappy for other reasons, so by helping another person become less unhappy (though not yet happy) one could thereby become happy?
Yes, indeed. And selflessly making efforts for others' happiness creates a well of magic the universe can dip into and sprinkle you with at its leisure, which is sublime and loving at its Source. That is why giving charity is so essential on the Spiritual Path of Love: because our individual and cultural selfishnesses are so stubborn, we need all the help we can get to truly self-evolve our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors.
"Ask and ye shall receive, ..." --New Testament
There are about 70k engineers at facebook, I doubt its possible for zuckerberg to be aware of all the product changes that happen in meta.
However, it also shows that meta has no functioning marketing skills. This I suspect is also down to Zuck.
Had they marketed it, and more importantly, had the engineers had the training to talk to marketing first, then this wouldn't have been an issue.
It's so bad I have to wonder if there's a different angle here, maybe they think that releasing something so terribly bad will make it easier when they release something less comically bad? Idk.
Odds are the product team cherry picked conversations for internal demos, their management wanted press and promotions, KPIs were around engagement and not quality, and nobody had perspective and authority to say “this sucks, we can’t release it”.
I mean, just very basic QA, having someone talk to the damn things for a bit, would’ve shown the problem, in this case.
Or with nihilists who learned to say yes to everything, to at least get paid.
It'll be like entirely automated catfishing.
Sure, they faltered at Step 2, but how was this not the plan?
They'll reach out to users and talk to them about whatever they're interested in. They'll then make influencer-style native advertisements. If you're a middle aged man that likes video games when you see their picture posts they'll be "wearing" some vintage game t-shirt (that's for sale). If you're instead a twenty year old woman into yoga the same bit will be "wearing" some new Lululemon yoga pants.
The first pass of these bots failed because they used the follower mechanism. The next version will just follow you to push ads or scrape more data about you.
I have worked with competent product organizations. I know they exist. A few even exist in SV. But for some reason the largest players have just absolutely lost the plot beyond what can get them to favorable quarterly earnings, and that game eventually and fairly consistently doesn’t end well in the long term.
Meta in particular is clearly rudderless, lacking in vision and strategic leadership, and throwing whatever it can find at the wall hoping to find something that sticks. Facebook turned into a cesspool, Instagram isn’t as popular with the newest demographics Meta has traditionally wanted to court (young people), and Threads turned out to be a nothing burger. Their grand quest to unify messaging was a disaster, and mores the putty because they’ve basically delineated their ecosystem by demographic generation in what has to be an unintentional series of missteps. Their “metaverse” projects weren’t even compelling to the teams working on them, their foray into crypto was over almost as soon as it began, and their business products are a nearly unusable mess for those of us who have had the misfortune of using them.
You’d think eventually someone at Meta would hit upon an idea that goes somewhere. It’s like a more pathetic version of Google’s stagnation.
These AI products are not made for users. They're made for Wall Street. Wall Street expects big companies to 1. talk about AI in their earnings calls, and then 2. do something, anything, with AI. All of BigTech seems to be doing this now, and investors are rewarding them by buying their stock. So they're going to continue the cycle of building useless AI products and then canceling them when they have served their purpose (pleasing investors).
For larger orgs I can imagine that number is larger and we definitely get a ton of positive interaction from that. That might be swayed by demographics but I can tell you age isn't one of them because our interaction (on WhatsApp Business which is mostly where I interact with Meta products) is decently in the 20-40 range.
Worst of all, is that Facebook is a terrible platform for hobby stuff. Plain ol' PHP forums are much better for that; they're much easier to navigate, easier to search, easier to host pictures on, etc.
I frequently find myself posting something on one of the Facebook hobby forums, then realizing that:
* the signal to noise ratio isn't great, because there's a ton of people spamming those forums with products and other social media that they're trying to promote, YT in particular.
* Facebook isn't great for long posts.
I think a hangover from the last AI winter, after which everything that would previously have been called ‘AI’ got called ‘ML’, the term ‘AI’ then being shareholder poison. Anything older than the current AI bubble mostly gets called ‘ML’ still, with a possible exception for non-LLMish CV stuff.
> The company had first introduced these AI-powered profiles in September 2023 but killed off most of them by summer 2024.
Also, they're deleting these profiles, which is a step away, not towards that idea. Although they're apparently leaving in some feature to make your own AI-profiles.
Netflix failed because they didn't make games people are interested in, not because people don't want those types of games.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inside-candy-crushs-success-s...
It all stems from promo culture -- it doesn't matter what you build, as long as it ships.
Works every time.
Don't assume that you can simply pattern match because you've been at another big company. I've been at three, meta being one of them. And they have all operated very differently.
I’ve been at companies like this where you are told to build X, you laugh with your co-workers, and then get to work because you’re paid disgusting amounts of money to build stupid shit like this.
That’s part of why I quit to start my own company. It’s such an awful waste of resources.
Execs don’t need to stay at Meta for a decade. They succeed, then exchange musical chairs. On average, it will work well for several iterations.
Also, another note, these sorts of big swing and misses are actually still identified as a positive, even when looked at retroactively. They're "big bets" that could pay off huge if they hit. Similar to VC culture, Meta is probably fine with 99 misses if 1 big bet hits. If they increase engagement even 1%, they're raking in billions and it is worth it.
1. To make you feel like there is activity. How would you simulate activity when you have no customer to start with? I suspect Youtube threw subscribers at you just to get you addicted to video production (the only hint that my Youtube subscribers were real, was that people recognized me on the street). And guess who’s mostly talking to you on Tindr.
2. For politics and geopolitics influence. Maybe Russia pays half the bots that sway opinions on Instagram. Maybe it’s China or even Europe, and USA probably has farm bots too for Europe, to ensure the general population is swayed towards liking USA.
3. Just for business, marketing agencies sometimes suggest to create 6x LinkedIn profiles per employees to farm customers.
Facebook doing it in-house and officially is just legalizing the bribe between union leaders and CEOs.
Simply have your users give you all the info you need to serve better ads; while selling companies advanced profiles on people? User profiles built by them engaging the bot and the bot slowly nudging more and more info out of them?
So many of these seven-to-nine-figure disasters are of the "Who thought this was a good idea?" class. They are often things that seem like they might appeal to folks that have never really spent much time, with their sleeves rolled up, actually delivering a product, then supporting it, after it's out there.
I'd be very willing to believe something like this happens at Facebook, too.
Nobody wants to deal with them, so they just kinda get what they want as long as they are mostly harmless.
Neurosama, an AI streamer, is massively popular.
Silllytavern which lets people make and chat with characters or tell stories with LLMs feeds Openrouter 20 million messages a day, which is a fraction of it's totally usage. Anecdotally I've have non tech friends learn how to install Git and work an API to get this one working.
There are unfortunately tons of secretly AI made influencers on Instagram.
When Meta started these profiles in 2023 it was less clear how the technologies were going to be used and most were just celeb licensed.
I think a few things went wrong. The biggest is GenAI has the highest value in narrowcast and the lowest value in broadcast. GenAI can do very specific and creative things for an individual but when spread to everyone or used with generic prompts it start averaging and becomes boring. It's like Google showing its top searches: it's always going to just be for webpages. Making an GenAI profile isn't fun because these AIs don't really do interesting things on their own. I chatted with these they had very little memory and almost no willingness to do interesting things.
Second, mega corps are, for better or worse, too risk averse to make these any fun. GenAI is most wild and interesting when it can run on its own or do unhinged things. There are several people on Twitter who have ongoing LLM chat rooms that get extremely weird and fascinating but in a way a tech company would never allow. Silllytavern is most interesting/human when the LLM takes things off the rails and challenges or threatens the user. One of the biggest news stories of 2023 was an LLM telling a journalist it loved him. But Meta was never going to make a GenAI that would do self-looping art or have interesting conversations. These LLMs probably are guardrailed into the ground and probably also have watcher models on them. You can almost feel that safeness and lack of risk taking in the boringness of the profiles if you look up the ones they set up in 2023. Football person, comedy person, fashion person, all geared to advice and stuff safe and boring.
I suspect these things had almost zero engagement and they had shuttered most of them. I wonder what Meta was planning with the new ones they were going to roll out.
I think some level of Neuro's popularity is due to the Vedal + Neuro double act though, and some of the scripted/prepared replies.
There probably aren't a lot of decent streamers who are also AI developers around.
I have a FB account for marketplace, and unsubscribed from all my pages and friends. If I log in, my feed is a neverending stream of suggested rage bait, low quality AI photos, nonsensical LLM "tips" on gardening and housekeeping.
The posts seem to attract tens of thousands of reactions and comments from seemingly real people.
This only proves that there's enough people on the planet around that bit of the bell curve to develop an audience.
Laid bare, it’s generally a variety comedy show of a human host and AI riffing off each other, the AI and the chat arguing and counter-roasting each other with human mediation to either double down or steer discussions or roasts in more interesting directions, a platform for guest interviews and collaborations with other streamers, and a showcase of AI bots which were coded up by the stream’s creator to play a surprising variety of games. There’s a lot to like, and you don’t need to be on “that bit of the bell curve” to enjoy a skilled entertainer putting new tools to enjoyable use.
No, I'd vote terrible idea terribly implemented so good (that it failed).
The argument for GenAI chatbots in culture has to be more than "people like it".
The worst possible GenAI is one that manages to be "better" than the standard sterile, moronic homogenized celebrity that everyone already likes. And sure, like any computer program, a GenAI can be randomly "interesting" but this kind of thing is quite shallow imo.
I don't think there should be bots like this on social media for humans, though.
It boggles my mind that there are people who think this is a good/ok idea. From a human perspective, all it does is pulls the mind ever closer to fictional imaginative world rather than encouraging real life interactions which I believe is inherently wrong no matter what business strategy is wrapped around it.
Remember when in 2013, 2015 and in 2020 Facebook was caught faking/inflating ad-view numbers so they would charge their customers more? Now AI viewing an ad is a feature and you want to pay for it.
Stack Overflow was great when it came out. But the whatever percent of humans who were mean and obnoxious and wouldn't let you just ask your questions eventually ruined it all.
Then ChatGPT came out without any humans to get in the way of me asking my software development questions, and it was so much better.
In the same way, when social media came out, it was great. But the whatever percent of humans who were mean and obnoxious and wouldn't let you just socialize and speak your mind eventually ruined it all.
If there's an equivalent social media experience out there that gets rid of or at least mitigates the horriblenesses of humanity while still letting people socialize online and explore what's on their mind, maybe it's worth trying.
I disagree. Apps are products with an editorial component. Editorials should be opinionated. It is passive and immature to simply not care how one’s products are used. Oppenheimer and Alfred Nobel have wise words on this topic.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-chatbot-threatening-m...
It’s something discussed here in this video.
The triviality of this allows malevolent actors to disrupt society and produce a chasm through echo chambers, each amplifying particular voices and shifting narrative.
Free speech is important, but it won't be found on X, or pravda-dot-social, and as much has been proven multiple times. What I take issue with and hint at is that neither of these are platforms that support free-speech, they are merely illusions, and people who yap about wrongthink are exactly those oblivious to said fact.
Personally, I am tired of arguing with people, I am tired of seeking truth in conversations with people unwilling to change their minds, I just want to live my life, safely.
When a community is formed, an implied set of rules are generated and applied. They evolve and change as time goes on. Sometimes they are the cause of the community dying, sometimes they are the reason is thrives.
Whether its a sports community (woo football is the greatest!) or a specific team (fuck the other team, booo) or cycling. Each community has a set of rules that you need to abide by in order for it to function.
Now, if you go and break those implied rules, you get told off.
A community falls apart when two or more factions form opposing implied rules in the same shared space. For photography, it could be the use of photoshop, digital cameras or, more recently AI. Either the factions learn to get on, or they break away and find somewhere more accepting. That is the natural order.
You could equally present those things as "wrongthink". But more practically its just a regulation mechanism for human interaction.
Now, you'll counter that "big corporations/politics determining what we see is bad", and then reference some time in the 90s where no such system existed. The problem is that the US media was brilliant at self censorship. Sure you could get specialist publications that catered to whatever taboo subject you wanted, just as you can now.
The issue is, online there are no constraints on behaviour. If I shout at 13 year old kid in the street that I'm going to fuck their mum, burn their house down, and generally verbally abuse them, generally someone will intervene and stop me. Thats not wrongthink, thats society. There is not scalable mechanism for doing that on online communities.
Is this AI bit the way to do it? no, its made by insular collegekids who've barely lived in the real world.
We are doomed as a society.
You can get so conditioned to expect negative feedback that you refuse to follow your curiosity.
People should write letters and emails and long form messages if they want to say a whole thing without interruption. My concern with working through an idea with a bot is you end up espousing the bots ideas and not your own -- it is the ultimate ideological homogenization.
People may not have the time or patience to write long form writing.
There are plenty of times I've disagreed with bots, but they're pretty good at neutrally bridging gaps instead of getting emotional. I think you underestimate human impulsiveness.
Understanding how someone has got to a point of view I disagree with can be useful.
You are literally creating a bubble of interactions with technologically enforced rose-colored glasses. Get the right person in charge of the experience, and don't be surprised if it becomes a modern take on Orwell's 1984.
I'm referring to the control of interactions and information. Take a look at the character interactions on the novel.
People socialized as they could, but interactions were not only heavily monitored (to your point), but altered as well. Winston struggles to behave correctly in public knowing that one small misstep could result in him being arrested by The Party. He revels in the chance to rebel against it, only to find that the opportunity to do so was in fact a trap. Even the allowed language was neutered as much as possible to prevent communication. All of these virtual 'friends' will likely politely comment and correct your posts as they see fit.
As for information, "we have always been at war with Eastasia". People in 1984 were clearly being fed false information as part of control. History was altered, facts were changed, it was pretty heavy handed. But imagine what this personal echo chamber could do with a new concept or idea (that virtually all parties you interact with corroborate, along with LLM generated 'news' posts and generated pics that support it), how many people will verify? Just think of how many folks you've seen have been misled by a single well-done "fake news" post; now, imagine that the network itself is confirming it at every turn (note Meta owns multiple networks).
Oh, and as a bonus, these virtual friends are really enjoying Brand Product. Have you tried it yet? Folks keep posting pictures of themselves with Brand Product, and they look pretty happy!
IRL these 90% turn into 10%, if you really care about socializing you'll have more meaningful interactions with the grandma living next door than with the queer black queen zuckerbot ™
It's like if people asked supermarkets to hide plastic apples amongst the real ones because they look better and never went bad, as if they somehow forgot why we even eat food in the first place
I’m stealing this
Might not want to say that in the grocery store while browsing those apples. Plastic apples tend to have network affects not usually associated with edible fruit.
Or, what if depressed people find the pressure of consequences too stressful to “just go outside and make friends”, and so the realistic options are chatbot or not enough socialization?
There are obvious nuanced issues and risks here but to distill it down to a one liner like “try to socialize IRL” is myopic.
Depression skyrocketed since social medias were introduced, I very much doubt adding bots to the equation solves anything. You'd be treating the symptoms, not the cause
And again, you're not going to cure obesity by eating plastic apples
Outside of how asocial and hostile society has become, there are certain people who understand more eccentric or fringe ideas and they can be quite rare.
I can see how supplementing some amount of artificial conversation can keep one better primed for interacting with the (rarer) people who might be more engaging on an individual level.
More of a stepping stone to realizing that other people might be interesting by finding value in human ideas.
The user hostility is partly what keeps the spam and repeated questions out. They even have a peer pressure achievement for deleting a post after someone commented on it.
Edit: I'm exploring the idea that social media is not really social. How much different is it to interact with a human intermediated by social media sites than it is to interact with chatbots?
https://bsky.app/profile/karenattiah.bsky.social/post/3letty...
It's becoming an increasingly apparent problem that people don't understand that LLMs frequently hallucinate, especially when asked to introspect about themselves. This was 100% a hallucination.
When the media and companies with a financial interest in AI have been shouting from the rooftops that "AI is going to replicate humans very soon and all of your jobs will go bye-bye because this thing will do everything better than you", can we really be surprised when the broader populace looks at it that way?
But this is a solved problem that Meta chose to implement poorly. It can be done right. I just asked o1 “create a diversity report for openai” and its very first paragraph is:
> Below is a *sample* diversity report for OpenAI. Please note that the numbers, programs, and initiatives are provided as *illustrative examples*. This report is not an official document, and the data contained here is *fictional* and for demonstration purposes only.
They're just ELIZA on steroids, people.
"There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Unknown
We digital logic folks are both tool builders and tool wielders. Usefulness is in the hands of the user, but that doesn't mean the creator isn't a dipsh_t who made a crap tool, or that the user isn't a moron.
My computer allows me to build stores of digital information representations, with functional integrations to other systems, including me. It's useful for me and my family, for sure.
This seems like a possible hallucination.
what was it ?? 48 hours before MS had to take them down ?
gone, but not forgotten
(When searching for a citation I found this little compendium of banger tweets, and the addendum that Tay had a brief reprise of accidently going live again, this time tweeting "kush! [ I'm smoking kush infront the police ]" I guess in the modern milleu this would be considered escaping confinement)
https://dailywireless.org/internet/what-happened-to-microsof...
It's better to pick a silly theme where if the AI does poorly, people laugh, rather than get upset.
This clearly was Meta’s attempt to come up with a more professional, sanitary version of it that might have appeal to people who aren’t techy enough to download C.ai and flip through cringe anime chat bots. And they went too far probably due to corporate design by committee.
But the core idea is valid.
but why would they implement it as a limited number of obviously handmade profiles with baked-in personalities? the internet is already full of real people's accounts that are, for all intents and purposes, without personality and ephemeral. real people sign up for facebook all the time who don't expose a personality, interact with a couple posts, and then disappear. LLM chatbots could be great at that. LLM chatbots can't be real people.
It can seem like a bunch of hippie crap but it really emphasised that we need more than just technology and engineering (and business engagement metric bean counters) driving decisions.
So much incredible technology behind the scenes and for what? This shit?
We need people with more perspective and humanity in the driving seat.
But making up fake minority stereotype bingo cards may have been the worst idea I've ever seen in AI to date.
Having bots with their own profiles and expecting people to engage with them in any meaningful manner is a silly idea.
But the extent to which the minority stereotype bingo card bots have backfired and started attacking the companies that designed them is probably the funniest thing to have happened in AI to date.
There were definitely Chinese and Indian males too
But beyond that, has social media not isolated people enough--soon, a large portion of people using it won't even interact with other actual people...
I don't see how a platform meant to "connect" people to others--scratch that, a platform meant to connect people to ad's makes perfect sense.
No, I have never noticed that. In fact, I have noticed the opposite.
Obviously the results of a google search isn't valid data. Who knows what's in their algorithm, what gets missed, what gets used more, etc.
Of course, it ain't right now and it weren't right then, but I'm not in the least surprised it happened.
I think your sentiment applies well to the general AI fairness strategy
Goddamnit. I kinda feel that should be not only illegal, but just short of a capitol crime.
although, if you mean it broadly; i.e. selling wars, selling the idea of fiat money, or taxation, or national debt, or the plandemonium... then i hear you.
So, they rediscovered Internet trolls?
You're assuming that Facebook has a plan. Which is at best, generous.
They are a bunch of overly active hall monitors with an incentives package that encourages people to "create impact" by increasing arbitrary metrics. At no point do they ask "is this good for the product/user" they ask "will this improve metric x,y or z"
These profiles come from the GenAI team, or worse, a competing team inside instagram (who are doing this so that they can then move to the better-chance -of-getting-promoted org that is GenAI) for some experiment where they prove that some metric improves, and doesn't lower another metric, if you shove AI onto the public.
After LLMs became capable of producing believably meaningful fiction texts, roleplay was one obvious use case, and a lot of people have fun with it. (Of course, some are weird and get attached to their own generated fiction.)
If we'd ignore all the US-specific craze (e.g. mentally replace "black queer" with something that doesn't trigger people, like, idk, "space unicorn"), this is really just another RP chatbot thing.
Recently I got an email from instagram saying it's "easier to get back to instagram", with my usual username. I can't check what's on that instagram user because they don't show you anything without logging in, so I asked my wife to check that instagram user for me. It doesn't have any photos nor profile photo or following, but it does have several followers that's my facebook friends (when I had the account), so at some point meta created that instagram account for me and associated it with my facebook account, I guess? I hope that account was not "AI-powered".
But that's correct and often occurs on black markets for all kinds of reasons, for example coffee and cigarettes in Germany after WW2 and Hungarian salami and tires in the GDR. There are no alternative currencies because they are strictly prohibited by penal law, otherwise they would occur in all kinds of areas. Governments only allow highly regulated alternative currencies, and even then only under very rare circumstances. Crypto coins weren't an exception to this, they only emerged a bit faster than how legislation could be updated.
the younger generation will not care much whether its generated by an AI or not. As long as its good and it hits their niche, they will not and should not care.
the implication and future predictooors dooming is also misplaced. in the sea of generative AI, imperfect, human produced content will end up becoming more valuable.
its like hand drawn anime by real humans vs computer assisted ones that mimic the style. younger generation don't even watch or care for the classics and they don't find the intrusion of computer graphics unholy like the rest of us old timers who appreciate and stopped watching it out of ideological differences. it wasn't the end of anime it actually increased the market size several thousand fold by lowering the barrier and cost of production (at the expense of upsetting the "luddites").
Exact same thing will play out across all consumable content. Even hardware.
That game series had an alarming knack for being prescient.
It's first time I hear about it, why is "Black" capitalised in that profile name?
It’s honestly so enshittified now!
Like he just kept scrolling and there 0 posts from friends - just influencers, brain rot and ads.
“Get BrainRot on the iOS and Android app stores and start feeling important today!”
But at the same time people don’t mind its current state. I don’t mind its current state. When I open instagram I get nonstop reels of people doing backflips on skis. I’ve honed my feed as such by only engaging (well, watching and not scrolling away) with those posts really. It is a much better experience than trying to find ski videos on youtube as I don’t need to hunt for the key clip, editing is pretty tight on instagram, and also no ads or other bullshit you get watching things on youtube.
Was this a big fake out.? What was the real ploy?
Meta really doesn't think things through when the come up with an idea like this, they just see potential revenue numbers with no thought to cultural impact.
Regulate them.
How did they sit in a meeting and somehow concluded that more idiotic worthless content - the very problem that has effectively already killed facebook years ago - would solve anything at all?
These people get multi million dollar salaries, yes?
Until it's good enough it can release it an nobody is the wiser.
I'm not seeing Meta responding with "actually we did have a team of black queer mothers working on this".
I find this stuff absolutely fascinating, that even an AI bot tries to do this sort of thing.
It just strikes me that there is no world in which racism will ever die out as long as things like this are happening. You can't have it both ways.
If race is just melanin content then we have no issue. That's the win case.
If your race is something that you need to proudly announce (because you personally feel that it has cultural connotations in most/many cases), then race is always going to be an issue, because of assumptions of those cultural differences.
If you choose to describe yourself by the colour of your skin first and foremost then you're telling everyone that you think that's relevant information which is, well.. the entire problem - you're telling everyone around you that you think it has predictive power.
But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.
People being loud and proud about their marginalised identities is not a problem. The pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback-to-the-pushback (the so-called "culture war") is a problem to the extent it gets in the way of solving the root problem (marginalisation, bigotry, and abuse), but statements of pride help address the root problem.
Rather than criticise "drawing these cultural battle lines", please fight the fight you think people should be fighting. You won't find yourself short of allies, should you make the effort. (Effort includes educating yourself about the relevant issues: it's pretty easy to find highly-specific resources. If you're completely stuck, and somehow have lost access to Wikipedia, visit your local library.)
The thing that I feel that this silly AI bot draws into sharp contrast is the idea that there can simultaneously be "asian/white/black culture" - as a generalised thing, not a person's experience in a neighbourhood or a country, literally just "white/black/asianness" (or whatever), and obviously the connotation there is that skin colour is intrinsically linked to culture, but then we expect people to pretend that skin colour has no correlation.
You can't have it both ways, it's a contradiction.
And here we have, err, a computer program, or the output of one, pulling in all of this stuff and claiming that it has a culture based on experiences of being a skin colour that it doesn't and can't even have.
It's just madness on every level!
I do agree that the AI bots were farcical, but they don't highlight what you're saying. You're talking about nth-degree pushback-to-pushback as though it's the actual facts-on-the-ground, which it's not. (The "culture war" is composed solely of the assumption that there is culture war, and people's responses to that: unlike the real issues, like systematic oppression, it'll go away as soon as we stop talking about it.)
I didn't think that's how the term racist is normally used. A definition:
a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group
Big difference.
I mean, do you believe that people should expect to be subjected to the weirdest and most hostile takes on gender relations and treated as potential rapists or sluts unless and until everyone uses gender neutral pronouns (even silly bots mostly identify as male and female at the moment)? If not, what is it about racism that obliges victims not to affirm their identity if they wish to cease to become victims?
I disagree, because one can powerless while simultaneously being prejudiced and antagonistic to others. Which means that anyone can be racist.
It is an odd way of calcifying late-20th century American upper class anxiety. If we can't give the engineers a different moral goal, it will become the default mode of knowledge. A more immediate problem than "AI will kill us" is the dev teams determined to avoid "erasure" or "digital genocide" or whatever they'd call a race/culture-agnostic AI.
Are you truly advocating that people should no longer be proud of their cultural identity? Are you applying that to all the folks in tech who proudly identify as Christian or Jewish? Does it apply to Italian Americans and Indigenous people? What about folks who are proud to speak endangered languages, like West Flemish or Romani?
Both my parents were born here, they've explained our lineage, but I literally don't care. I'm an American, America is my culture and country.
A hell of a lot of people want to "just be American" and a lot of Americans won't let them.
People who are "just angry and will direct it at whatever" can be very dangerous, as we've seen in the US even this week and in every school shooting and terrorist attack for years.
This is, terribly, the American experience. It used to be the Irish and the Italians before we decided they were "White enough." It doesn't mean we should just ignore it and accept it. If you're mad, that doesn't give you a pass to be a racist asshole to the first person less pale than a porcelain plate you see.
If anything, the fact that people have to know and cope with random Americans being this exact sort of racist asshole to them is the reason they form their own communities and see themselves as Black Americans or Asian Americans or any other sort of national or racial group.
My take on the comment was that so long as a trait is relevant to some people, it will be dispised by some other people. Either it's completely benign or it's somewhat polarizing. There are few things that only range from neutral to positive without detractors.
A person describing themselves as being Christian is only signaling that they are a follower of the Christian faith to some degree.
They are different for that reason. Christian doesn't have a physical appearance associated with it (well, other than say vestments or pendants).
All Christians are Christian.
Not all Asian-appearing folk are culturally Asian, not all culturally Asian folk are Asian-appearing. Even the concept of "Asian culture" (I do of course accept that such a concept exists) is super general in a much wider ranging way than the Christian faith. Maybe that explains it better.
To illustrate it in another way, imagine some LLM prompts:
"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a Christian about their faith?"
"Hi ChatGPT, can you make me a poem written by a White person about their culture?"
There is just a fundamental... grammatical wrongness(?) about the last one in my mind, I'm not sure that I can explain it if it's not already obvious.
(Shrug) If you didn't build it, what could possibly justify taking pride in it?
Pride in inborn cultural identity gets you things like Nazi Germany. It's not a win for either individuals or societies, only for intermediate subgroups whose interests rarely coincide with either.
Removing racism does not mean removing race.
but it's dumb to discriminate against coincidental attributes.
Anything that a bot can do and possess I have no difficulty in its being labelled as doing and possessing those things.
Otherwise I do have problems, although theoretically a bot could exist as a piece of art and in that case we should forgive these lying claims to qualities they cannot possess by the current standards our society holds for artistic practice.
An AI bot didn't try to do this. Someone at Meta, who was likely none of the things in the profile, decided to do this.
There are numerous fake social media pages where posters oretend to be a minority, but are run by state actors to sow division in the US. Those have been extremely successful in fooling people; I wonder if its success is related to pre-existing biases readers already have in terms how they think "others" talk.
Like, if all the black people would just stop identifying as 'black' racism would be solved?
Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but all of the responses to this suggest to me you're on a different planet than I am. Alternatively you drank the early 2000s kool-aid that "people don't see race" and thought that was actually working until people started identifying as the thing they get criticized on the internet for being.
In my country (Eastern Europe) racism is approximately non-existent, but nobody was putting gas on fire for decades or more. I know a black guy that is quite famous around here, do you know what he never said? "I am a proud black person". He is a great person and people love him.
Can you provide some examples of racism? I am aware of some against Gypsies 40-50 years ago, but it is gone these days. Even that, it was against the culture, not the people, Gypsies going "modern way" were fully accepted, but traditions like kid marriage or living a nomadic life in carriages was not.
That isn’t to say that I think central or Eastern Europe are outliers — I have personally witnessed at least as much racism in countries considered to be more progressive, like Sweden.
The point is, to say it’s virtually nonexistent is plainly untrue.
2. The second part of your analogy is the "I know a black guy" trope that happens in the US. It's a pretty common thing, and no one believes people are 'not racist' just because they 'know a black guy'.
How are they treated now? Asking my past 2 managers, both Jews, Israeli citizens doing business in Eastern Europe, they are happy with the current times. This fire is also put out.
No it's not. Acknowledging the current situation is not an assumption and does not doom us to push every single aspect onto future generations.
Culture is real. The way to change part of culture is not to simply deny that that part exists.
We should not be in the business of telling other people which aspects of themselves they can and cannot identify with. Admonishing black identity is perpetuating this cultural eradication, and so it is not the neutral position you think it is.
That's all tangential from the topic at hand anyway. On-topic, Liv is a great example of the corporate appropriation of culture.
Zuck needs to step down, he’s too detached from reality. On the other hand I don’t know who’s left after him, he’s probably surrounded by slimy yes-men.
At this point it's just watching something weird die painfully
It’s such a weird religion.
Boo.
Occam's razor - it was an hallucination.
Even if the article existed, getting the right article (instead of simply using the first Bing result, which is what the other Meta AI does) and the reasoning in a one shot instant response is better COT models like o1
If you have Messenger, try asking it to list the team behind them or their Tom Brady bot, it will not get far
It seems these were just insanely poorly trained and gated - getting a bot to comment on its dev team, including in some cases specific names of lead designers, is something that feels crazy to let a bot just do. Even if all the data it would respond with is made up slop, this exact debacle is why you do your best to make a bot not even try to answer this sort of stuff.
As for what information it was trained on that it said its dev team had no black devs, that seems fairly reasonable based on general statistical information and scholarly articles it was trained on. It may still be incorrect, but that's a pretty statistically likely outcome, so it's not surprising an LLM built to parrot the statistically likely outcome would say it.
Isn't the weirdness here that someone at Meta seems to have decided that they should make an AI bot that proudly announced its identity, despite literally not being proud, queer, black, or a mother?
Who does this serve? Why?
I could see a bot that's into fitness or some other hobby having a niche as a wrapper around an AI meant for advice on the hobby, but there's a certain crazy hubris to going "this LLM can really speak as a member of an identity group".
The word "religion" brings so much baggage with it that it just causes a cascade of communication errors in this context.
Pareto when translated from Italian to English called this "non-logical conduct" and "sentiments" but after a 100 years no one seems to care much about this aspect of Pareto's thoughts.
Sentiments would be a great word for it though instead of "religion".
Woke sentiments instead of "woke religion".
The concept of identity sentiments might even be a little bit of progress.
People type that kind of thing into their insta profile. These AI personas were designed to appear to be using Instagram in the same way people do - which is, typing things like "queer black mom" into their profile
imo, Meta should ditch metaverse and focus on gaming/media/productivity for the headset and leave the social aspects to their rayban-kind devices.
This has been line this for at least a few years.
I heavily assume Facebook is getting richer from enabling scam