Featured Image Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor / NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty
The future of Facebook could be looking very different, and while you might currently use it to wish Aunt Mabel in Australia a happy birthday, you could soon be talking to an artificial intelligence version of your relative.
Meta might've struggled with its Metaverse, but alongside keeping invested in the idea, Mark Zuckerberg seems destined to push AI onto us all.
The next two years will apparently involve Meta transitioning 'hundreds of thousands' of AI creations onto Facebook, allowing users to create chatbot clones of themselves or whole new online personas.
There are already complaints Zuckerberg is helping fuel the 'Dead Internet Theory' that the internet has been deceased since as early as 2016 and is now simply computers talking to computers.
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There's an even more vocal corner of real-life users who are vowing to shut up shop on Facebook. If this is the case, will robots be left to inherit whatever is left of the social media platform?
When news of Meta's AI push was shared on r/Futurology subreddit, there was a less-than-welcome reception. One disgruntled Facebook user simply wrote, "Just the nudge I need to delete my Facebook."
Another added: "I haven’t even been on in years. Almost 10 years. I’ve decided to just fully delete the account after I download my pictures."
A third chimed in: "Translation: 'Our real users are quitting the platform, so we will fill our community with fake users instead."
Looking at the bigger picture of where they feel things are heading, someone concluded: "I hate what they did to Facebook. It was perfect to start with - a fun little way of keeping up with what your friends were doing; status updates and the odd photo they’d taken.
“People made joke profiles for their pets and well-known fictional characters. The whole thing was very chilled.
"Unfortunately they had to turn it into a gigantic money-making machine - so joke profiles were purged, and in came adverts, corporate profiles, news, propaganda, AI drivel; anything to drive engagement, whether good or bad. Obviously that was the plan all along, but it sucks."
Aside from spending our days interacting with bots instead of real people, others suggested that advertisers won't be able to tell the difference between real engagement and bot engagement, suggesting it's a sneaky way of driving up clicks and ad revenue.
Meta's rules state that any AI-generated content has to be labeled clearly on all platforms, but there's no word on whether this will continue to be the case.
The thread was full of examples where images are presented as real-life (often to push political agendas) but are clearly created with AI. With this, there are accusations that misinformation is already being spread before we even open the floodgates to wholly AI accounts.
Highlighting other problems, many on Reddit said they've already given up on Facebook amid claims that their feed is made up of 'AI slop', pages that aren't relevant to them, and adverts.
Meta is standing strong by its AI commitment for now, but only time will tell whether this gamble pays off.
