“Synthetic” (from IAS, not people) profiles are gaining space on Facebook

In December, an executive of the goal caused a commotion by saying that the company's expectation was for profiles generated by the company to take the company's platforms “more or less the same way as the accounts of individuals exist today.”

“They will have biographies, profile photos and will be able to generate and share content fed by the platform … This is the way we are following,” Connor Hayes, vice president of Generative Artificial Intelligence, told the newspaper. “Financial Times“.

Hayes specified that the goal expected this development to happen “over time.” Although this idea didn't seem to me at all interesting, I also thought it wouldn't be an immediate threat. But in recent days, a lot of profiles generated by IA has taken over my feed From Facebook.

I'm sure these people made by AI are a much more rude manifestation of the idea that Hayes was defending. But their presence made me even more cautious with the idea of ​​the goal of reinventing a social network based on synthetic personalities.

The posts in question come from a variety of Facebook pages, full of IA content, which I didn't ask to follow. The names of the pages, such as “nature and animals”, “news of today” and “world of dogs” have little or nothing to do with the themes of the posts. And the themes are … bizarre!

How bizarre? Something like half of the posts I saw involve images generated by the elderly AI displaying birthday cakes that they themselves made. Most others are related to artisans who have created sculptures elaborated from materials as diverse as wood, ice and vegetables. Some show wild animals in trouble being rescued by humans.

Besides inserting these posts in the feeds From users who have not asked, the goal tries to increase engagement through their AI bot, the AI ​​goal. An image of a bearded man who made a cradle for his grandson – just to find that “nobody liked it :(” – is accompanied by suggested questions such as “Why didn't you like it?” And “Baby reaction to the crib.”

None of the answers that generates it has the lowest value, creating a vicious cycle in which the goal feeds a form of bad artificial intelligence with another to generate even more bad content.

This does not mean that I did not find this material briefly hypnotizing when he appeared in my feed for the first time. Curious to understand what was happening, I clicked some posts to read the comments. An alarming percentage was limited to sending happily anniversary votes, compliments for artistic creations and good vibrations in general.

Either Facebook members who left the comments had been deceived, or – even worse – they were happy to feel happy with the achievements of IA profiles in cafone scenarios with minimal variations.

How to get rid of the profiles generated by IA

After a few days doing this, I started to worry about a possibility: does interacting with these posts somehow have something to do with them appear in my feed?

Maybe Facebook played me as someone who was enjoying this content (although it has never clicked on the “enjoy” button), not just as a victim of my own morbid curiosity.

So I started using the “I have no interest” option to warn the algorithm that I didn't want to see this kind of content anymore. A day later, they seem to have disappeared, although it is still early to declare that they were eradicated.

None of the answers that generates it has the lowest value.

In your best – as when group moderators take your work seriously – Facebook is still wonderful. It may even work up to Mark Zuckerberg's sentences about its mission to be “connecting the world.”

But these AI posts have nothing to do with it. Stripped of his humanity and stuffed with Generative AI, Facebook becomes the worst type of junk food possible digital.

And the worst part is that the bad contaminates the good. As false comparisons of “before and after” photo generated by IA began to appear, I started to pass over similar posts made by people I follow.

Only after slowing and analyzing them more carefully did I realize that they were real members of their family, and no longer empty calories. I felt that I was having to moderate my own feed – which, on second thought, is an official Facebook policy these days.

Perhaps the company can somehow institutionalize the generator profiles by Ia in a way that adds value and leaves no confusing member.

But I can't help but ask myself: instead of welcoming people generated by IA on your platforms, the goal wouldn't be doing something much better if you made sure that the only people you will find will be real people?

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