The slow drip of sketchy tech practices
One day you're putting a sepia filter on your selfie, the next you're unknowingly following an AI bot.
In the strangest article I’ve read in a hot minute, last week, Meta discussed with The Financial Times that it plans to fill its social media platforms with AI-generated characters to help drive engagement.
Some eyebrow raising quotes from the article:
“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.”
“He said hundreds of thousands of characters have already been created using its AI character tool — which launched in the US in July, with plans to expand its access in the future — but most users have kept them private so far.”
“Meta has also introduced a tool for users to create AI assistants that can respond to questions from their followers. Next year it plans to release its text-to-video generation software to creators, allowing them to put themselves into AI-generated videos. Meta’s chief Mark Zuckerberg has previously demonstrated the ability to conduct live video calls with a creator’s AI avatar that could converse in their style. Creators can shape the system to avoid certain topics, or choose topics to promote.”
Meta claims to take misinformation seriously and works to eliminate bots and fake profiles, but in what universe is this different? Not only is Meta creating fake profiles (that they will undeniably prioritize in their algorithm), but they’re introducing in-app tools for people to make their own AI bots.
Where is the authenticity? Is there a benefit to these profiles beyond monetization and narrative control? Remember when social media was just about connecting with your friends and family?
In the days following the Financial Times article, Meta rolled back these profiles – but its only temporary (These are not going away. Meta is investing billions in AI).
They claim it’s because of a glitch that doesn’t allow users to block the AI bots, not because there was an extreme backlash from Meta’s human users. Something tells me that when these AI profiles return, there won’t be a splashy PR interview to announce their comeback tour.
Instead, it will be yet another sketchy practice that the tech company will bury in updated terms and conditions or a monthly software update. It will be another step in Meta taking control of our information in exchange for what? Our ability to scroll? To “connect” with others?
With every update in terms or software, we have relinquished more and more control and information about ourselves. Do we have a breaking point?
Terms & Conditions on your personal information
When Instagram launched in 2010, it was both revolutionary and in relation to today’s social media platforms, rudimentary. You uploaded pictures to your feed, you could apply a crappy filter, and you usually added a short and silly description. Hashtags hadn’t even been implemented yet. Facebook (Meta) bought Instagram in 2012, and then advertising was added to the platform shortly after, in 2013. The founders got rich. The users started to get used.
I don’t have data on the amount of software updates and revised terms and conditions that have been released since then, but we all know it’s frequent. Sometimes, it causes a mini uproar. Someone finds something fishy in the update, people complain, and then….nothing changes. We got sucked back into our feeds, we forgot what we were even mad about in the first place.
But we should have stayed mad.
We have given Meta (and other tech companies) all of the power. Meta takes and uses your data, has a (free!) license to all of your content, and most recently, is using you to train AI. These are all things you have “agreed” to in the terms and conditions, simply by continuing to use their “service” once they update the terms.
It’s like being in a relationship with someone who pretends to be this incredible person, but slowly, the more hooked you are, the more that they reveal their true nature. Before you know it, you’re so trapped, and there’s so many things that you do enjoy, that you are willing to take the crap in stride. Are we in a semi-abusive relationship with Meta?
When I was doing research for this essay, I stumbled on this article that explains the steps you can take to limit the information that Meta is taking from you. This list is insane. I imagine if you really took all these steps, the app would barely even be usable anymore. The best alternative is listed at the very end – delete and stop using this app.
How to stop Instagram from spying on you
Here are some steps you can take to protect your privacy, secure your Instagram account, and limit how much data Instagram can collect about you:
Log off while you’re not using Instagram
Use Activity Off Meta Technologies for Instagram
Turn off microphone permissions
Disable camera access
Turn off geolocation access
Manage Activity Status
Use the Allow Selected Photos feature
Don’t use Instagram’s direct messaging
Don’t log in to apps or websites via Instagram
Disable the Connect Contacts option
Delete your account
The technology is not neutral
Tristan Harris says, in his 2017 60 Minutes Interview, “There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true.”
Behind the technology that you use is a team of thousands of programmers who are using your own personalized data to hook you. They are using classic psychological tactics to control your emotions and ultimately your actions. Your free will is slowly being chipped away.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from the people on the inside. From Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier:
You may have heard the mournful confessions from the founders of social media empires, which I prefer to call “behavior modification empires.” Here’s Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook:
We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.… The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.
Here’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook:
The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem— this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen.… So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.
You are a profit machine
At the end of the day, you have to remember that nothing is free. As quoted in The Social Dilemma, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”
Meta, YouTube, TikTok, X — they make money off of your every move. They do not need to offer a subscription model because that will never rake in the profits that their current advertising model does.
These platforms take your most personal information — where you go, who you DM, what profiles you visit, what images you linger on, what you click, what you buy, what pictures you take, what you look like — and they use it in two manipulative ways.
First, they take that information and use it to form your own specific feed - ensuring you will spend the maximum amount of time doom scrolling on their infinite feeds.
Then, they sell that data so you in turn buy more things that you think you need. They profit off your every move.
Do you really want to give these companies all of this power and control?
Is it all really worth it?
Three cheers for citing Jaron Lanier’s illuminating & prescient “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” I did. And I’ve never once regretted it since.
That whole AI profile thing is actually mental. I read some articles as to why they wanted to introduce them in the first place. Two reasons kept popping up, one is to improve engagement. Make these fake profiles comment and create posts to "spark conversation" as overall engagement is declining. The second is to improve the engagement metrics for influencers 🤣 As due to the algorithm reducing posts reach to ACTUAL HUMANS they fill them with fake profiles to view,like and comment. So the influencer economy keeps going. These are two fixes to problems of their own making. It's actually bonkers.