Are there real people posting on Facebook?
Four years ago, on the fringes of the message-board internet, many started to argue that no, most users on Facebook and other social media platforms were AI bots. In fact, the internet made by real human beings had died back in 2016 or 2017. In a widely read article in The Atlantic, this idea was called a “conspiracy theory” that was probably “wrong” but “feels true”.
Then, at the end of December 2024, Meta told the Financial Times that was, er, the plan for the future:
We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. “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,” he added. Hayes said a “priority” for Meta over the next two years was to make its apps “more entertaining and engaging”, which included considering how to make the interaction with AI more social.
The admission went viral. Sleuths discovered what they believed to be these new AI users, only to realise that they had been created by Meta over a year ago. One was “Liv,” a supposed “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller.” Her Instagram profile was filled with her non-existent children, whose number and appearance differed in each AI-generated image. Alarmed by the backlash, Meta pivoted, and claimed their hopes for AI profiles was just some speculative dream for the future.
This has been the direction of travel for some time. Real human users have been posting less and less, turning the “scroll” into a passive medium populated by so-called “creators” (many of who will be, or already are, AI generated).
“Engagement” data has long been manipulated by fake clicks and reads to boost advertising revenues. The question of just how much any of this is “real” is a looming one, and for Meta, certainly an existential one. They cannot monetise “connection” if nobody wants to connect.
The consequences, to my mind, may in fact be far, far weirder than the juicing of ad metrics. Building on our previous Sentient Memes seed, Dead Internet Theory arose from the numerous reports that the profiles of dead friends and relatives were being hacked and hijacked by bots - many of them porn bots posting “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░” or AI-generated images of shrimp Jesus. This is the uncanny valley, a mishmash of duelling algorithms and content strategies.
I have my own personal conspiracy theory. That we are living in a simulation, and that simulation is the Dead Internet an alien civilisation has long abandoned and forgotten to switch off. We’re bots in a photo-realistic Facebook Minecraft app that once belonged to real beings. As our own virtual world edges towards this reality, is it that farfetched to suppose another intelligent civilisation has not already arrived at that destination? And we are living in it?
In the Ruins of the Digital
- Thread starter ver$hy ver$h
- Start date
sus
Moderator
In his essay about tiki culture, "Taboo: Time & Belief in Exotica," the musicologist/magicologist Phil Ford talks about how the Beat were really geared around re-attaining primordial vision, or in particular, of viewing the modern as if it were primordial. Viewing oneself as if one were a "primitive of some future culture unknown."
sus
Moderator
I think there's something really interesting about this kind of imaginary self-conception. There is a whole space geared around the juxtaposition/resonance between the modern and the ancient: post-apocalyptic films, life after humans CGI docus on History Channel, treating decaying infrastructure as ruins.
sus
Moderator
There's a picture book I read as a kid called Motel Of The Mysteries and it's about archaeologists in the future who are excavating an America that's been buried underneath junk mail. And they're just excavating a Motel 6 but they have no idea what anything is so they assume the toilet seat is an altar, and the shower cap is religious costume.
sus
Moderator
Hard to talk about this sort of thing without mentioning Internet Archive
and its recent outage, and just how tenuous the online archive is.
Television Without Pity's entire writing archive got nuked when NBC bought the publication and stopped paying for webhosting--a really crazy decision, given it was basically a bunch of simple text/html pages, i.e. the server costs were pocketchange. Becuse of a fluke in the site (their pagination system) the Internet Archive scrapers never saved the full essays. Tens of thousands of pages were lost, many of them brilliant
and its recent outage, and just how tenuous the online archive is.
Television Without Pity's entire writing archive got nuked when NBC bought the publication and stopped paying for webhosting--a really crazy decision, given it was basically a bunch of simple text/html pages, i.e. the server costs were pocketchange. Becuse of a fluke in the site (their pagination system) the Internet Archive scrapers never saved the full essays. Tens of thousands of pages were lost, many of them brilliant
sus
Moderator
It's good we have tons of nostalgic computer nerds building emulators, so vidya games are pretty safe; see e.g. Internet Arcade.
I hear in arts archiving/librarianship, it's much dicier. Some work of art will only play on a 1976 machine and there are like 6 left in the world and no one knows how to fix them when they break.
I hear in arts archiving/librarianship, it's much dicier. Some work of art will only play on a 1976 machine and there are like 6 left in the world and no one knows how to fix them when they break.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
sus
Moderator
"We are primitives of a future culture unknown."
I think what's interesting is this defamiliarizing move lets you re appreciate or romanticize the present
I have been thinking a lot of those "Happy Turkey day You Slut 🍑👅💦" chain texts. They are incredible hieroglyphic works if you think about them with the right frame. The semiotics of An ancient and primitive libidinal society
I think what's interesting is this defamiliarizing move lets you re appreciate or romanticize the present
I have been thinking a lot of those "Happy Turkey day You Slut 🍑👅💦" chain texts. They are incredible hieroglyphic works if you think about them with the right frame. The semiotics of An ancient and primitive libidinal society
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
Interesting a belief in this theory doesn't appear to really alter the behaviour of the believer. They tend to carry on posting, talking to other users as though they're real. I suppose there's still an element of doubt at the moment and we all believe we're talking to actual people, but then again there are also those already happily talking with bots in full knowledge that that's what they are.
Maybe we'll end up with the real people in closed groups and chats and the rest of the web a sort of wasteland of bots, advertisers and those who want to interact with that stuff. It may already be happening.
yeah, is this because in the public square internet there is some kind of residual social contract governing the performance of adherence? So everyone is pretending to listen to everyone else, whilst actually listening to everyone else, but then also noone is listening to anyone, whilst pretending not to actually listen to anyone else. It's a kind of performance paradox.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
A long, long time ago.
yep. loads of the surviving obsolete hardware is boxed/unused in the original packaging, gathering dust in storage vaults as part of the collectiosn of hardware completists... people won't unbox them because as soon as they do, they lose their value. Lil Yachty was talking about this, he spent an absolute fortune collecting a boxed AND unboxed version of every console.
In my Juno106 synth one of the 8 voice chips is dead. So I could buy a modern clone, fine no problem. But if I want an actual Roland voice chip there's nothing I can do because Roland haven't made any new ones for decades. Some guy in Germany is hoarding a massive pile of them and waiting until the unit price reaches a ridiculous level before releasing them one at a time...