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Building the Loneliness Nexus [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-06
Title stolen from the famous “Now we have finally built the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi book ‘Don’t Build the Torment Nexus!’” tweet.
Meta, what Facebook renamed itself when Zuck decided that legless avatars that made Weeble-wobbles look good was the wave of the future, had a bit of a donnybrook this week. They announced that they were going to add AI bots to their social media products. Problem was, they already had AI bots on Instagram. And they are terrible.
Users soon found these remnants of a previous project and tested them. They did not do well. The one claiming to be an African American woman was a wee bit cringy in its replies. More concerning, it flat out lied about what it had done that weekend. It claimed to have participated in a winter coat drive and even showed a picture of a box of coats, presumably generated by imitative AI.
And, of course, you could not block these accounts.
Meta claimed that the inability to block as a bug and removed all the profiles until it could be corrected. These specific accounts are likely to never come back, given the bad press they generated. But as Ars Technica points out, they intend to go full steam ahead with imitative AI.
It is all so sad.
I am certain that Meta is adding these imitative AI accounts because they are staring at a demographic cliff that they have no idea how to overcome. I am pretty sure they have opened their arms to bots because they don’t have enough content to drive engagement on their platforms. Someone has apparently decided that the solution is not to try and change their systems to encourage real people to post. Nope, much better to burn a forest every day in order to get imitative AI bots that pretend to donate coats to the homeless. I am afraid that pretty soon most of what people see will be bots, not real people.
Social media companies used to fight bots. They understood that artificial voices were anathema to their stated goals. Artificial voices provide a distorted to false view of the world and, more importantly, get in the way of real human connection. Instead of finding connection with other people, users’ feeds will likely be dominated by these fake accounts. The companies probably assume they can fine-tune these imitative AI bots to drive exactly the kind of engagement they want. I very much doubt that is the case.
They may want, for example, an African-American account that never says anything the majority of its users would find controversial, but the random nature of the imitative AI responses will make that extremely difficult to control. They may want a specific emotional content out of bots, again, it will be hard for a random world calculator to ever be specifically one thing and only that one thing. They may want bots that don’t generate controversy, but even the most anodyne bot, as we have just seen, is poised to lie and lies almost always draw attention. Just as importantly, these are eventually going to be too boring or too random to keep people engaged.
I have already written about how these kinds of bots have failed as surrogates for emotional support. That is largely, though not entirely, because of the random nature of their responses. A similar outcome can be expected with these new social media bots. They will be uncontrollable, they will lie in ways that are both disturbing and embarrassing, and they will get in the way of people actually connecting with other people. They are, in most ways, the complete opposite of what people expect social media to foster. And all for the low, low environmental price of the health of the entire planet.
Loneliness is a real problem in the US. Most third spaces and civic organizations in the US have disappeared. Social media companies used to be based on the idea of connecting people. Now, they are based on the idea of keeping people tied to their screens. I suspect that this is backfiring on them. Facebook is largely the domain of AI slop. Twitter has turned into the Klan’s favorite social media company and is losing people. Threads already has an issue with boring, uninteresting algorithmic feeds. I doubt that Meta would be so interested in spending the large amounts of money needed to run these imitative AI bots if they weren’t losing users and or user engagement in alarming, to them, numbers.
It is telling that Meta turns to AI instead of other solutions. The fact that they think that artificial people are as good as real people is telling. Gemini, Google’s imitative AI product, as a commercial showing how it can be used (the fact that Gemini is likely to give you wrong information is not, of course mentioned.) and in every scene but one, the people using Gemini are completely alone. They are holding conversations, telling a machine about their dreams, trying to use it as a teacher. They are reaching for connection, for the touch of other humans, and finding artificial arms instead.
Real connection is hard, messy, sloppy, and largely uncontrollable. Fostering real connections means more work and probably slightly less engagement and growth. It means, in other words, letting people drive the direction of the network, and more work to ensure they don’t drive it off the cliff. Easier, these companies seem to think, to remove the human element altogether.
The one scene in the Gemini commercial that involved multiple people was a work scene. They were trying to use Gemini to write a letter that would convince their boss to not make them work on the weekend. No mention of a union, no mention of a strike, no mention of anything that represents real, human solidarity. Gemini would help them beg, but it would not help them organize.
Bots are not a substitute for people, no matter how much our tech overloads may wish it so. Pretending otherwise merely deepens the loneliness problem in this country and drives us farther away from each other.
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