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Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

I'm Scandinavian and not invested in the American culture wars and I still got a good chuckle out of how bad an idea this was. Who on earth could've thought it was a good idea to get an AI to pretend to be a black queer mother of two? I'm sure it'll piss off a lot of anti-woke people, but really, how on earth did the issues with this not become obvious for the team? I'm not sure if the AI knows who trained it (and I wonder how they did it) but the team can't have included a lot of common sense or real world experience for them to do something so fundementally stupid.

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I'm baffled that they didn't even try to hide the fact these profiles are artificial but outright add that bleak gray text saying "AI managed by Meta". I mean, did we reach some checkpoint here where reality is blurred with fiction? Do we now treat these generated personas on par with real humans?

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.

> I mean, did we reach some checkpoint here where reality is blurred with fiction?

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

> Who on earth could've thought it was a good idea to get an AI to pretend to be a black queer mother of two?

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?

The article indicates that it was one of 28 personas created by meta. However, the reporters in between the story and you, thought that one would be interesting to you and so promoted it's relevance. In actuality, if you rolled a dice of potential human traits 28 times, this could be a statistically normal combination

Lol 1 outta 28 isn't a black queer mom of two.

The clash of these characteristics is what defy and define these unlikely odds.

This is trolling rage bait. Like most big corp content.

I'm not sure if you're joking but your comment expresses it backwards - according to the op article, meta made 28 such bots. One of those bots had the insta profile tagline "queer black mom". In between meta's creation of the 28 and the story arriving on your dinner plate, someone decided to focus the coverage on that one of 28. They thought it would be interesting to people and clearly were right

What they're saying is that the odds of such a combo are far less than 1 in 28 IRL.

How did you determine that?

I'm not OP and I have no idea what the actual odds are. But, well, only 15% of Americans are black to start with, and obviously only half of those are women - and at that point we're already down to 1 in 14. So, unless every other black woman is a queer mom, there's no way it's 1 in 28.

If you were trying to mimic a distribution of Instagram users, and you rolled the dice 28 times, it's not unreasonable that this combination of traits could be expected one twenty eighth of the time.

This is birthday paradox logic, not census logic

A birthday is only one metric that the people in the school share. This is five variables.. So no..

Can you explain why it is you think that makes it any better? I can think of no argument that would make this particular persona anything but a tremendously stupid idea. Even if it was one in a thousand personas it would almost certainly be found and singled out by articles like this one.

> how on earth did the issues with this not become obvious for the team?

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?

I don't think it's woke or rage bait. As I said I think it's no real world experience and no common sense and I'm frankly amazed that nobody in a SoMe/advertisement organisation didn't consider how the world would react.

I think it will piss off woke people, too.

It seems designed to piss off everyone.

Perhaps the product manager was a black queer mother of two?

Maybe everyone of the 28 AI "people" represents one of the team members, but that doesn't make it any less of a bad idea in my eyes. As a father of girls I've seen full well how representation matters in media, but I suspect that AI "people" is the one area where people will want as little representation as possible.

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