Wow. Must-read article on how AI and algorithms are destroying Facebook, from the former editor of Vice's Motherboard

[highplainsdem]

https://www.404media.co/email/24eb6cea-6fa6-4b98-a2d2-8c4ba33d6c04/

Facebook Is the 'Zombie Internet'
JASON KOEBLER
MAY 2, 2024 AT 10:14 AM
Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore interact to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.

-snip-

But I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.

-snip-

On Meta’s first quarter earnings call last week, Mark Zuckerberg said that “right now, about 30 percent of the posts on Facebook feed are delivered by our AI recommendation system. That’s up 2x over the last couple of years.” Zuckerberg is referring to a TikTok-like “For You” system on the News Feed where content is being recommended that is not content from pages or groups that users have specifically liked, nor is it content that people’s friends have interacted with. As Stanford researchers Renee DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein found, AI spam is being recommended using this system and is showing up in people’s feeds. I have seen this on my own feed, but I have also seen it on two brand new, burner Facebook accounts I created to research this story.

-snip-

The overwhelming sentiment was that the accounts commenting on these images were also bots: “In my experience, the supermajority of engagement on viral AI Facebook pages is just as artificially-generated as the content they publish. When exploring their comment sections, one will often see hundreds of bot-like comments interspersed with a few ‘real’ people sounding the alarm to no avail,” Khan Schoolcraft, a moderator of the group, told me. “It’s like yelling into an empty room full of a thousand identical brick walls.”

-snip-

All of this, taken together, is why I think we should not view Facebook’s AI spam through the lens of the “Dead Internet.” The platform has become something worse than bots talking to bots. It is bots talking to bots, bots talking to bots at the direction of humans, humans talking to humans, humans talking to bots, humans arguing about a fake thing made by a bot, humans talking to no one without knowing it, hijacked human accounts turned into bots, humans worried that the other humans they’re talking to are bots, hybrid human/bot accounts, the end of a shared reality, and, at the center of all of this: One of the most valuable companies on the planet enabling this shitshow because its human executives and shareholders have too much money riding on the mass adoption of a reality-breaking technology to do anything about it.

Much, much more at the link.

[phylny]

1. The AI machine is doing a terrible job.

I knew something had changed, but didn’t know what it was. Now I know.

[Voltaire2]

2. yup it is a flood of unwanted shit.

i use facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, it is an increasingly awful experience.

[usonian]

3. You bring up important issues.

I'll have to process them and reply separately.

We seem to have reached the "AI event horizon" and change is necessary, not because you and I are old-fashioned, it's because the customary channels are flooded with garbage and are mostly useless for anything but "clicks", which are meaningless to real people.

And the thought leaders are now reinventing the internet. Self included with any luck and determination.

Education is changing, too. "Learning to get a grade" is more important than learning how to learn and innovate.

AI is built on past data, like economics, and see how well that works.

stay tuned

[brooklynite]

4. I guess I don't understand whom other people are Friending and following

I'm in touch with actual.....friends. And family members. I don't received political diatribes or fake news stories in my feed.

[mopinko]

5. i'm so tired of being that person.

either tagging ai, or scams. explaining how to reverse search an image. begging ppl to click through b4 sharing, and the tells that it is a scam.
my best friend is mad at me rn cuz she shares all kinds of sparkly crap, and i’m not the only 1 giving her a hard time. she has slight brain damage, too, so it’s hard.

it’s draining.