“AI users” is the most bullshit, sanitized euphemism for “bot” I’ve heard since ever. So imagine the uproar when the internet heard that Meta had been populating Facebook and Instagram (both Meta properties) with them and saw the future of the platform as being a mix of real users and “AI users.” Then add the fact that people were unable to block or restrict the “AI users,” unlike with real users, and the internet meltdown had commenced.
Now Meta has backtracked, saying that the “AI user” experiment (no, I won’t stop using the quotation marks) had begun in 2023, and that due to confusion in reporting they’d be removing the accounts. Here’s what happened, almost entirely in the span of an afternoon.
the wind up
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta told the Financial Times (paywalled) back on December 26, 2024 when the article was published. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going.”
Rolling Stone covered it on December 30, but nobody paid much attention to it in the brain-dead lull between Christmas and New Year’s Recovery Day, January 2. But when a host of prominent tech websites, including The Verge, Gizmodo, and 404 Media picked up the story on January 3, users began to mouth off about the audacity of Meta to unleash this Black Mirror-esque hell on us, from X to Instagram’s own comments sections.
a swing and a miss
Shortly after the slew of internet coverage and social media outrage caught fire, a Meta spokesperson, Liz Sweeney, reached out to 404 Media with the message that many of the “AI users” that were being noticed (and roasted) by commenters had been deleted.
“There is confusion: the recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product,” she said. “The accounts referenced are from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters. We identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block those AIs and are removing those accounts to fix the issue.”
Note what she says and what she doesn’t say, though. Sweeney says “We… are removing those accounts to fix the issue.” Not “We’re removing those accounts permanently because it freaked everyone out.” They’re being removed to fix the bug that prevented people from blocking the “AI user” content and then… what? Meta presumably spent a lot of money developing this, uh, feature, and so I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it return to Facebook or Instagram once this bug has been fixed and the social media outrage cycle moves on.
Facebook’s estimated 30 million-plus dead members are the least annoying people on Facebook, followed by regular people, followed by bots, followed by real people pushing hate-speech conspiracy theories and anti-vax misinformation because, hey, there’s no way people may have ulterior motive for saying these things to you, like making loads of money off your engagement, right? Right?? You do your own research, so research it.
People are skeptical and distrustful of a mega-powerful corporation’s attempts to blend AI-generated pretend people into spaces designed for real people. Meta’s “AI users” had tags identifying them as such, but with their fake profile photos and writing styles designed to disguise, or at least minimize, their identity as AIs, they resonate with the public’s growing fears that we’re on the cusp of not being able to trust our own eyes and ears anymore to know who’s real and what’s a machine pretending to be human to profit off of us.
Mark my words: This won’t be the last time a major corporation tries to blend “AI users” into spaces designed for humans under the guise of humans.
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