There’s a deluge of “AI”-generated long-form stories, usually accompanied by “AI”-generated pictures, on Facebook. Many of them are clearly made-up feel-good stories about someone doing something unusual and kind for someone else.
They’re easily identified – most start with a similar introduction about how the person never did this before and then something about them, usually including their age, which is often in the 70s – but people still persist in sharing them. And someone always points out in the comments that this particular piece is “AI.”
Actually, the fact that it was written by the predictive software labeled as AI isn’t the major problem here. This crap is a problem regardless of whether it’s generated by software or by some badly paid schmuck trying to cobble together a living.
The stories are presented as if they are true, but they aren’t. They detract both from fiction and from true stories about humans doing something good. And they are put in front of us on social media to keep us from engaging with our friends there.
Another thing I see regularly are supposed biographies of people and other supposedly historical stories presented in a clickbait way – “They thought she was just a little old lady, but then she she did this and wowed everyone.” These are often about real people.
Some of the facts are reasonably accurate, but the take is not usually the way things happened. The most recent one I’ve seen has been about Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. I’m pretty sure these are fake pages with pieces by “AI.” They’re certainly not trustworthy, but they’re even more likely to be shared because they look factual.
When someone shares these things because they want them to be true – and I think that’s why most people share them – they are continuing Facebook’s relentless push to make everything in our lives completely false.
It’s pretty clear that the broligarch crowd thinks the rest of us are NPCs and that nothing we do or say really matters. I don’t think it occurred to the people developing social media that we ordinary folks like having a tool that enables us to keep in touch with our friends; they were making something to gather data on us.
I stay on Facebook, even though I have to navigate past so many ads and so much slop, because I can keep up with people who live thousands of miles away in a casual manner. Today I saw that someone I know has died. We haven’t been in close touch in the past dozen years – the last time I saw her was at my father’s memorial service – but she was someone I liked and cared about, someone with a connection to my family even though I’m probably not on the list of people to notify officially. I’m glad Facebook made it possible for me to find out, just as it has made it possible for me to share messages with her over the past few years.
When I get a chance to see people from Facebook in real life, I have some idea what they’ve been doing – books they’ve written, crises in their lives, trips they’ve taken, that sort of thing. Plus I enjoy sharing Wordle scores with friends on there. A silly thing, perhaps, but a way of connection.
I have a lot of friends in different places. I would never be able to keep up with them with individual emails (or letters like we did back in the day). Email is for more direct communication, for when we might be able to get together or work together on a project. Social media is for keeping a handle on what’s going on in people’s lives.
But Facebook, which is the best form of social media for staying in touch with actual friends – as opposed to things like Blue Sky and what Twitter used to be, which are better for keeping abreast of the news and finding interesting writers and podcasters – is heavily polluted with slop.
I don’t usually waste time worrying about it, just scroll past as I do with ads, but so many people I otherwise like and respect share this crap, which upsets me. They’re being taken in.
They’re smart people, many of them writers, and they’re being deceived, not just by “AI” but by crap written to draw their engagement and minimize their connections to real human beings.
I know there are worse things than “AI” slop on social media going on in the world right now – just look at the federal invasion in the Twin Cities in Minnesota and the horrible and embarrassing performance of the criminal occupying our White House in Davos – but this stuff is still important.
We need to be sure about the information we’re gleaning now more than ever and the broligarchs are making their employees work hard to make sure we can’t be. While this is not directly the same as the destruction of our government and of the international order, it’s related.
Shoving “AI” slop at us from every angle, and overpromoting the use of the technology with that name for things for which it is not suited so they can make ridiculous amounts of money from it and undermine the valuable things done by real people is yet another thing we need to resist along with violent attacks on our neighbors and absurd claims on other countries.
The broligarchs are hoping we’re not paying close attention because of all of the other distractions. They’re building their bunker cities and figuring that even if we are more than NPCs, we still don’t matter.
Let’s prove them wrong.